Gender differences in willingness to pay to avoid pain and their correlation with risk.

This article presents experimental evidence on forced choices between inferior alternatives. In asking subjects to make trade offs between an experimentally induced cold-pressor pain of different durations and paying money to avoid the administration of pain, we try to shed some light on the questions: (a) are there any gender differences in elicited willingness to pay (WTP) values for pain; (b) when present, is differing WTP across genders better explained by measures of risk-aversion or measures of loss-aversion; and (c) we further investigate whether there are variations in hypothetically elicited WTP values (hypothetical pain and hypothetical money) and WTP values elicited when subjects face real consequences (both real pain and real money). Our results confirmed the hypothesis of significant gender differences in elicited WTP values in both the hypothetical and real groups. We also found some evidence of significant differences due to the treatment. Subjects who experienced the cold-pressor pain only once (hypothetical group) exhibited on average greater WTP compared with subjects who experienced the cold-pressor pain multiple times (real group). Females, however, stated lower WTP in the real treatment while for males the effect was in the opposite direction. Moreover, we found risk attitudes to be significantly associated with WTP while loss-aversion not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)