Spyware – Risk and Ambiguity Attitudes

In this paper, we argue that ambiguity, that is people’s inability to judge likelihood of risk, is a significant contributor to aversion to spyware risk. Since no objective or authoritative estimates of risk likelihood are available, but users still make decision, it must be the case that user’s judgments of risk likelihood are reflected in their decision weights. Using the theory and methods developed in the field of decision theory, we plan to conduct an experiment to a) assess the separate contributions of standard risk aversion and aversion to ambiguity to overall risk and b) examine whether peoples traits (optimism/pessimism, tolerance for ambiguity) and perception of information explain the patterns in the parameters corresponding to risk and ambiguity functions