Putting Risk in its Proper Place

By Louis Eeckhoudt, Harris Schlesinger. Social Science Research Network, 2005

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines preferences toward particular classes of lottery pairs. We show how such concepts as prudence and temperance can be fully characterized by a preference relation over these lotteries. If preferences are defined in an expected-utility framework with differentiable utility, the direction of preference for a particular class of lottery pairs is equivalent to signing the nth derivative of the utility function. What makes our characterization appealing is its simplicity, which seems particularly amenable to experimentation.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41bbdaa2722cf4d196d9bf8ffa4d20667533ce0f