This thesis provides an interpretation about how wildland firefighters can experience risk by relations of trust. The author shows that the risk taking and wildland firefighting literatures inadequately account for how trust underpins self-construction processes among people who participate in risky activities. To supplement the literatures within these terms, the author uses interview data and personal stories about managing wildland fire to propose a general trajectory of being and becoming a wildland firefighter that details the significance of trust in self-construction processes. The author argues that in the process of being and becoming a wildland firefighter, risk is sometimes increased, decreased, concealed, revealed, and anticipatorily transformed through trust. The author provides a framework for viewing risk that can be used to understand danger to the self. / Graduate

This study investigated risk-taking behaviours among 244 first year students (Male=52 and Female=192). The risk-taking behaviours of the students were grouped into Risky and Violent Behaviour, Tobacco Use, Alcohol and Drug Use, Risky Sexual Behaviour and Unhealthy Dietary Behaviour subscales. Statistically significant correlations were found among all the risk-taking behaviour subscales other than Unhealthy Dietary Behaviours, which did not correlate with the other risky behaviours. Statistical significant sex differences were found regarding risk-taking behaviour that implicated males as higher risk-takers than females.

This research was based on the premise that psychological research on risk-taking behaviour has emphasized a one-dimensional model of instrumentality and cognitive functioning derived from male experience. The central research question "How do women experience risk-taking?" was investigated by analyzing definitions and examples of personal risk described by 44 women, and by comparing relationships between subgroups assigned by occupation and by sex-role orientation. The findings indicated that women experienced risk-taking that spanned both dimensions of affiliation (connection to others) and instrumentality (attainment of personal goals). A new definition of risk-taking was proposed that incorporated elements of uncertainty, emotional involvement, loss, and a process of change. Women in traditional occupations described a similar number of affiliative and instrumental risks, while women in non-traditional occupations emphasized instrumental risks. It was observed that the opportunity and demand for risk-taking appeared related to social context and work activity. Significant differences were also found between women in traditional and non-traditional occupations with respect to sex-role orientation (from the Bern Sex-Role Inventory), employment status, income level, and number of children. No differences were found between sub-groups designated by occupation and by sex-role orientation with respect to estimates of risk-taking tendency from a self-estimate scale and the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire. The results supported a critique of the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire, citing an emphasis on instrumental and hypothetical risk-taking. Participants also reported that the CDQ was not relevant to their lives. The feminist approach encouraged active participation and evaluation by the women in the study. As a result, participants reported an increased understanding of themselves and of the process of risk-taking. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

There has been a vast amount of research done in the fields of Entrepreneurship and Risk Taking. There is, however, very little literature regarding the relationship between Risk Taking and Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE). This study attempts to understand that relationship whilst exploring the impact of Risk Propensity on Corporate Entrepreneurship with the intention of questioning current CE frameworks. The objective was to establish criteria to increase CE in the business environment. A bespoke questionnaire was sent out to determine both the individual Risk Propensity of the respondents and their perception of CE within their organisation. The elements of the questionnaire were based on well-known instruments available in literature. The variables used to explore the data further were based on the demographic information supplied by the respondents. The main objective of the study was to determine the relationship between Risk Propensity and CE with the secondary objectives looking to explore the variation in both Risk Propensity and CE across the established variables. The findings indicate little or no relationship between Risk Propensity and CE whilst the results from the variable analysis highlight the importance of Organisational Boundaries as a factor of CE. A framework is then proposed synthesising the results of the analysis before concluding with recommendations for future research. / Dissertation (MBA)-University of Pretoria, 2014. / lmgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

When a choice model fails, the standard economics exercise is to weaken one assumption at a time to study what has changed. This is often accompanied by the understanding that future work will relax multiple assumptions simultaneously in order to explain actual behavior. This dissertation does exactly that, and by studying seemingly independent behavioral anomalies as related to one another we obtain new insights about why behavior departs from standard models. Chapter 1 studies how violations of structural assumptions like expected utility and exponential discounting can be connected to reference dependent preferences with set-dependent reference points, even if behavior conforms with these assumptions when the reference is fixed. This is done with the introduction of a unified framework under which both general rationality (WARP) and domain-specific structural postulates (e.g., Independence for risk preference, Stationarity for time preference) are jointly relaxed using a systematic reference dependence approach. The framework allows us to study risk, time, and social preferences collectively, where behavioral departures from WARP and structural postulates are explained by a common source—changing preferences due to reference dependence. In our setting, reference points are given by a linear order that captures the relevance of each alternative in becoming the reference point and affecting preferences. In turn, they determine the domain-specific preference parameters for the underlying choice problem (e.g., utility functions for risk, discount factors for time). Chapter 2, a joint work with Silvio Ravaioli, conducts an empirical test for one of the models in Chapter 1. It studies how the introduction of a very safe or very risky option affects risk attitude. In a laboratory experiment, we find that adding safer options increases displayed risk aversion, and it does so even when the added options are not chosen. This finding is robust across participants and treatments (e.g., degenerate and non-degenerate safe options). By contrast, we find that the addition of risky options does not result in a detectable change in risk attitude. Our results are in line with Chapter 1’s Avoidable Risk Expected Utility model. Chapter 3 studies choices over time, which allows us to study anomalies “at a given time” and “across time” as related to one another. This is achieved by studying how past choices affect future choices in the framework of attention. Limited attention has been proposed as an explanation for the failure of “rationality”, where better options are not chosen because the decision maker has failed to consider them. We investigate this idea in a setting where (1) the observable are sequences of choices and (2) the decision makers are aware of the alternatives they chose in the past when they face future choice sets. This provides a link between two kinds of rationality violations: those that occur in a cross section of one-shot decisions and those that occur within a sequence of realized choices. Unlike the former, the frequency of the latter is naturally bounded, and their occurrence helps pin down preferences whenever a standard model of limited attention cannot.

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / The stage of adolescence is a transitional stage in human development that can be confusing and stressful as it involves adjusting to adulthood which comes with independence and responsibilities. Adolescents solidify their journey towards self-identity as they gradually detach from being completely dependent on their parents. They form new bonds with peers and other people and are bound to be experimental as they embark on a life discovery journey. Studies reveal that adolescents are increasingly engaging in risk-taking behaviours such as risky sexual behaviour, substance use and violence, despite the implementation of numerous behavioural change interventions

My dissertation consists of two essays on CFOs' promotion-based tournament incentives and performance-based equity incentives. The first essay examines the joint implications of CFOs' tournament incentives and equity incentives for firms' risk-taking. With the pay gap between the CEO and the CFO as the proxy for the CFO's tournament incentives, I find that the relationship between a firm's risk taking and the CFO's tournament incentives is non-monotonic. In particular, I show that below a certain level, increase in pay gap is associated with increase in firm risk taking (e.g., higher leverage, lower cash holding balance and higher R&D intensity). However, after reaching a certain level, the CEO-CFO pay gap negatively impacts risk-taking, as increase in pay gap is associated with lower leverage, higher cash holding balance and lower R&D intensity. With the CFO's pay-performance sensitivity as the proxy for the CFO's equity incentives, I find that the CFO's equity incentives negatively impact firm's R&D intensity, but have no significant impact on broader financial decisions such as capital structure and cash policy. Collectively, my findings indicate that CFO incentives play an important role in firm's risk-taking behaviors, and the effect of the CFO's tournament incentives is more pronounced. The second essay studies the impact of tournament incentives and equity incentives for CFOs on firms' earnings management, including accrual-based earnings management (e.g., total accruals, abnormal accruals) and real activities manipulation (e.g., abnormal discretionary expenditures, abnormal production costs). Measuring the CFO's tournament incentives as the pay gap between the CEO and the CFO, I show that the CFO's tournament incentives positively influence total accruals and abnormal accruals. Meanwhile, the CFO's equity incentives, measured as the CFO's pay-performance sensitivity, are found positively related to real activities manipulation proxies and total accruals. My findings show a consistent pattern before and after the passage of SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), but the incentives' effects on earnings management have become less significant in the post-SOX period. Overall, the CFOs' tournament and equity incentives both play an important role in earnings management, but their relative importance lies in different earnings management techniques.

No description available.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is the leading cause of substance use disorders among Veterans and 55 to 75% of the population that are diagnosed with PTSD also receive a comorbid diagnosis of AUD. The co-diagnosis of PTSD/AUD is associated with neurocognitive changes such as increased impulsivity and risk-taking behavior, especially among individuals with combat-related trauma. Furthermore, increased neuroinflammation in subregions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are suggested to contribute to these neurocognitive changes. To better understand the cognitive deficits associated with co-occurring PTSD/AUD we incorporated a probabilistic discounting task (PDT) to model risk-based decision-making in male and female Wistar rats that were exposed to restraint stress (RS) and chronic intermittent ethanol exposure (CIE). Following RS and CIE, rats underwent lever press training through a series of different training phases, in which one lever delivered a small reward 100% of the time, and the other a large reward, delivered with descending probability each trial block. Pressing the large-reward lever during the final two trial blocks when it is disadvantageous to do so is considered “risky” behavior. A week prior to PDT, rats were treated prophylactically with CDPPB, a positive allosteric modulator of the metabotropic glutamate type 5 (mGlu5) receptor, to determine if the cognitive deficits caused by stress and alcohol exposure could be prevented. Additionally, to determine if our model mimicked the neuroinflammatory mechanism seen in the human condition and the therapeutic effects of CDPPB, we assessed TNF-⍺ protein expression in a subset of rats. Our results indicated that male rats exposed to RS and CIE had significantly greater responding during the 3rd, 4th, and 5th risk blocks compared to all other groups. However, the administration of CDPPB reversed this effect. Females exposed to RS and CIE only displayed increased risky behavior at the highest risk block and this was also blocked with the administration of CDPPB. We also determined that RS and CIE significantly increased TNF-⍺ levels in the IfL cortex compared to either RS or CIE alone and the prophylactic administration of CDPPB reduced TNF-⍺ protein expression to control animal levels. In the present study, we demonstrate that exposure to stress and chronic alcohol leads to significant neurocognitive deficits resulting in increased risky decision-making, but these deficits can be attenuated through modulation of the mGlu5 receptor prior to behavioral testing. Additionally, these deficits could be due to deleterious neuroinflammation in subregions of the PFC.

No description available.