A Study Of The Zhejiang Managers' Attitudes To Decisions Under Risk

Manager plays an important role in creating and developing an enterprise. As the shoulder and controller of business risk, managers'attitudes towards decisions under risk will affect company's business directly or indirectly. Thus it's important to study managers'attitudes towards risky decisions. By their positive contribution in business and outstanding performance in market, Zhejiang managers have received much attention. Meanwhile in the academic research about decision making under risk, prospect theory, as a representative theory under descriptive paradigm, explained many economic paradox but also faced challenges from different empirical results. Thus the universality of prospect theory is a hot topic among researchers.Based on the practical and academic background, this paper focuses on Zhejiang managers and does an empirical research about their attitudes to decisions under risk and the influence factors. Firstly this paper analyzes the related theories and especially reviews prospect theory and its empirical research. Secondly, by questionnaire based on scenarios and gamble choice, this paper analyzes Zhejiang managers'attitudes to different risky decisions and their special risk preference. The main conclusions include:(1) the chance of loss and the chance of gain are the most important risk attributes in Zhejiang managers'opinion; (2) in risky decisions with different nature or types or risky levels, Zhejiang managers hold different attitudes, which is not fully match with prospect theory; (3) gender, age, education background, position, working experience and personal wealth level are the main factors which influence managers'attitudes to personal risky decisions; and education background, personal wealth level, company's performance and company's role in supply chain are the main factors which influence managers'attitude to company's risky decisions; (4) managers who meet with certain level or attribute of the influence factors show unique risk preferences; (5) perception of risk, the character of decision-maker, the character of decision environment and the character of decision task are four important components of the model for studying people's attitude towards risky decisions. On the one hand this paper analyzes the character of Zhejiang managers' preference in risky decisions which replenishes the research of managers'decision making under risk and Zhejiang businessmen's characters, on the other hand it tests the universality of prospect theory under different background and proposes a reference model for the study of attitude towards risky decisions.