Given adolescents' propensity to engage in risky activities, experimentally elicited risk preferences have received much attention in this demographic group. In order to address the likelihood of engaging in potentially harmful activities, this study investigates various correlates of adolescents' risk preferences. Few studies have looked at other dimensions of decision-making under uncertainty in this important population, and here we attempted to close this gap by conducting a "lab in the field" experiment with adolescents. Our goals were twofold. First, we assessed both standard risk preferences during adolescence, as well as those of ambiguity and the higher order concept of prudence. Second, we examined the influence of individual characteristics of the decision-maker on attitudes towards risk, ambiguity, and prudence. In addition to gender and age, we focused on cognitive and noncognitive abilities as potential moderators of interest Our results demonstrated that adolescents are risk neutral on average, however they are also typically ambiguity averse and display prudent behavior. Also, we found that various individual factors influenced adolescents' attitudes towards risk, ambiguity, and prudence. These specific characterizations can greatly aid in targeting policy in adolescence, and we conclude by suggesting several possibilities for these interventions.

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We describe a risk protocol that combines the rigor of economic studies of risk with the ecological validity of tasks from psychology. Despite a wealth of experimental contributions on risk preferences, stemming from a variety of elicitation tasks, the external validity of standard measures of risk is questionable. In this study we focus on a risk task-the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)-which is highly successful in predicting health-related risk behaviors such as alcohol use, drug use, smoking, unprotected sex, driving without a seatbelt, and stealing. The BART is not commonly used by economic scholars because of concerns that participants may not adequately comprehend uncertainty associated with the task and because of the resulting difficulty in relating participants' choices to standard risk models. To answer these concerns and build on associations with real world risk, we designed a modified BART, which we will refer to as the Balloon Economic Risk Protocol (BERP). In this protocol, participants observe the distribution of pop points prior to the task to create a more consistent knowledge base. We then use a belief elicitation technique to produce a user-generated prior distribution of balloon pops. Using these measures, we compare participants' behavior to the expected-value optimum to provide a link to standard models of risk. In accordance with past economic literature, we found that participants' BERP-generated risk preferences revealed mild risk aversion on average, and correlated with a self-report questionnaire on drinking, drug use, and smoking behavior.