Ambiguity Attitudes, Beliefs, and Learning About a Natural Source of Uncertainty in Digital Markets

15:40-17:00, Tuesday, November 10, 2026

I-206, Boxue Building

Dr Ariel Gu is an Assistant Professor in Behavioural Finance at the School of Economics, University of East Anglia. Ariel is the Research Lead for the Behavioural Finance cluster at the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) and an External Behavioural Finance Consultant at Chadwicks, a UK wealth management company. Prior to joining UEA, Ariel held an appointment as an Assistant Professor in Finance at Durham University, where she received her Ph.D. in Finance in 2020. Her research interests include behavioural finance, household finance, applied econometrics, and portfolio management. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Empirical Finance, and Economics Letters.

Products featuring random reward mechanisms have become a staple of digital markets, generating billions of dollars in revenue worldwide. Despite their economic significance, relatively little is known about how consumers respond to unknown reward probabilities, how accurate their beliefs about these probabilities are, and how they update these beliefs based on past experience. We conduct a laboratory experiment using such a product as a natural source of uncertainty, and estimate structural parameters capturing decision makers' ambiguity attitudes and subjective beliefs. We use these estimates to study how decision makers update their beliefs about the underlying probabilities as they observe rewards through repeated interactions with the product. We find that ambiguity attitudes change little with experience, whereas subjective beliefs adjust rapidly towards the underlying probabilities. Our findings provide behavioural insights into the effectiveness of mandatory disclosure of reward odds as a regulatory tool in digital markets.

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