The role of individual personality type in subjective risk elicitation outcomes

Managing uncertainty is an unavoidable challenge in a variety of decision contexts. On many occasions, objective data are not available, necessitating the use of experts. However, research into procedures to elicit and aggregate information from experts is difficult to validate or test empirically. A controlled economic experiment was used to assess subjective probability elicitation accuracy resulting from three alternative elicitation procedures and two aggregation alternatives. The empirical results provide evidence of the impacts of elicitation techniques, distribution type, and personal characteristics such as risk preferences and personality type on subjective risk assessment accuracy. Our conclusion is that experimental approaches hold promise as a technique to assess the forecast accuracy of aggregated subjective probabilities in a variety of contexts.