Publicness and micro-level risk behaviour: experimental evidence on stereotypical discounting behaviour

Anti-public stereotypes suggest that public agents are more likely to shun risk and tolerate delay vis-à-vis private agents. Based on context dependency of administrative behaviour, this study reports experimental evidence from 22,800 choice tasks exploring the effects of publicness as a mental frame for individual risk judgement. Decision makers are not automatically triggered to deviate from predicted economic discounting behaviour when switching from a public to a private sector context. However, public sector employees in this sample systematically overestimate risks and tolerate delay in rewards compared with the general population, tentatively linking public sector affiliation with biases in risk behaviour.