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Item does not contain fulltext The present experiment tested the causal impact of testosterone on human competitive decision-making. According to prevailing theories about testosterone's role in social behavior, testosterone should directly boost competitive decisions. But recent correlational evidence suggests that testosterone's behavioral effects may depend on specific aspects of the context and person relevant to social status (win-lose context and trait dominance). We tested the causal influence of testosterone on competitive decisions by combining hormone administration with measures of trait dominance and a newly developed social competition task in which the victory-defeat context was experimentally manipulated, in a sample of 54 female participants. Consistent with the hypothesis that testosterone has context- and person-dependent effects on competitive behavior, testosterone increased competitive decisions after victory only among high-dominant individuals but testosterone decreased competitive decisions after defeat across all participants. These results suggest that testosterone flexibly modulates competitive decision-making depending on prior social experience and dominance motivation in the service of enhancing social status.

Two major approaches to measuring risk attitude are compared. One, based on the expected utility model is derived from responses to lotteries and direct scaling. The other measure is a psychometric approach based on Likert statements that produces a unidimensional risk attitude scale. The data are from computer-assisted interviews of 346 owner-managers who made decisions about their own businesses. While the measures demonstrate some degree of convergent validity, the measures based on lotteries predicted actual market behavior better than the psychometric scale. In contrast the psychometric scale showed more coherence with self-reported measures such as innovativeness, market orientation, and the intention to reduce risk. In the light of the apparently higher predictive validity of the lottery-based measurements, we recommend elicitation methods based on the expected utility paradigm for understanding managerial decision making under risk.