William Harbaugh

William Harbaugh

William Harbaugh is an economist at the University of Oregon. He is first author of the 2010 Economic Journal paper that tested the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes under two measurement methods and found it when people priced gambles but not when they chose between a gamble and its expected value.

Who they are

Harbaugh's own University of Oregon page places him in the Economics Department in Eugene, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. It lists his research areas as altruism and neuroeconomics, including brain-imaging studies of charitable giving, the economic behaviour of children, such as bargaining, risk attitudes and rational choice, experimental economics, including risk attitudes and gender differences in competition, and public goods and the economics of charitable giving.

The page names Kate Krause and Lise Vesterlund as his co-authors on the fourfold pattern paper. This page rests on that profile and on the abstract of the 2010 paper. It does not say where he took his degrees or describe his career beyond the research areas he lists.

Key papers

Harbaugh, W. T., Krause, K., & Vesterlund, L. (2010). 'The Fourfold Pattern of Risk Attitudes in Choice and Pricing Tasks.' The Economic Journal, 120(545), 595-611. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02312.x. First author, abstract read. The paper examines how robust the fourfold pattern is under two elicitation procedures. When participants set prices for gambles, they were on average risk seeking over low-probability gains and high-probability losses and risk averse over high-probability gains and low-probability losses. When they chose between a gamble and its expected value, individual decisions were indistinguishable from random choice. The sensitivity to procedure held between and within participants and remained when they could review and change their decisions. The authors say the pricing procedure is more complex and suggest that more cognitive load may exacerbate behavioural anomalies.

His page also lists other papers, including a 2001 American Economic Review paper on the development of rational choice in children and a 2002 Experimental Economics paper on the risk attitudes of children and adults. We have not read them.

Key ideas

The idea attached to Harbaugh on this site is that the fourfold pattern was examined under two measurement methods. The original experiment by Tversky and Kahneman (1992) derived certainty equivalents from a series of choices against sure amounts and found the full pattern in 22 of 25 graduate students. Harbaugh and colleagues found the pattern in prices and not in choices against expected value. The authors suggest that the pricing procedure is more complex and that more cognitive load may exacerbate behavioural anomalies.

Sources

  1. Harbaugh, W. T., Krause, K., & Vesterlund, L. (2010). The Fourfold Pattern of Risk Attitudes in Choice and Pricing Tasks. The Economic Journal, 120(545), 595-611. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02312.x
  2. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5(4), 297-323. doi:10.1007/BF00122574
  3. University of Oregon, William Harbaugh's page, harbaugh.uoregon.edu, read 28 October 2026.
  4. Vault note: [[William Harbaugh]].