Thank you - this is a bizarrely bad question. Not only is "earn interest" a very different use than "eat dinner", but someone short on money is also more likely

Thank you - this is a bizarrely bad question. Not only is "earn interest" a very different use than "eat dinner", but someone short on money is also more likely to have access to short-term, high-yield "investments" like avoiding fees. Investing 100 Euro for a year might earn 5%, but if 100 Euro today lets me avoid taking a payday loan, I could 'earn' 30%+ in interest not incurred, and should take the money now in more cases. If I'm 100 Euro behind on my gas bill and know the fee for late payment is 80 Euro, I should obviously pass up 150 Euro in a year. If my car I use to get to work is broken, I need 80 Euro to repair it, and I'll make 150 Euro tomorrow by not missing work, then taking the money now is higher payoff (250 Euro total) than any return offered (max 200). It's a constant frustration I have with econ experiments, even when they're less blatantly silly than this. The Allais paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox) is interesting, but it ultimately shows that people's preferences change when you add an equal amount of expected value to every choice in a wager. When you look at the actual uses of money (e.g. the sub-linear correlation with happiness), it stops being surprising or irrational that people's appetite for risk varies with the dollar value being wagered.