Harsanyi (1955) proved that, in the context of uncertainty, social ratio- nality and the Pareto principle impose severe constraints on the degree of priority for the worst-off that can be adopted in the social evaluation. Since then, the literature has hesitated between an ex ante approach that...

We analyse participation in medical prevention with an expected utility model that is sufficiently rich to capture diverging features of different prevention procedures. We distinguish primary and secondary prevention (with one or two rounds) for both fatal or non-fatal diseases. Moreover, we...

We revisit and extend previous theoretical work on internationalization decisions by firms which are imperfectly informed on the state of the demand in the market into which they are planning to export or enter through foreign direct investment (FDI). The latter is a costly strategy mitigating...

This paper examines how to satisfy a separability condition related to “independence of the utilities of the dead” (Blackorby et al., 1995; Bommier and Zuber, 2008) in the class of “expected equally distributed equivalent” social orderings (Fleurbaey, 2010). It also inquires into the...

Considering a consumer with standard preferences, I trace out the consequences for risk aversion and prudence of quantity constraints on markets. I first show how the effect can be decomposed into a price risk effect and an endogenously changing risk aversion/prudence effect. Next, I calibrate...

This paper considers the problem of the optimal timing of the exchange of the sum of n geometric Brownian motions for the sum of m others. We propose a closed form determinable stopping time based on the heuristic principle of smooth fit. We cannot prove that this stopping time is optimal....

This paper considers the general problem of optimal timing of the exchange of the sum of n Ito-diffusions for the sum of m others (e.g., the optimal time to exchange a geometric Brownian motion for a geometric mean reverting process). We first contribute to the literature by providing analytical...

We introduce a simple measure of risk aversion in the large. Besides satisfying properties which are conceptually analogous to the usual properties of the Arrow-Pratt measure, the index of risk aversion in the large leads to a stronger concept of decreasing risk aversion, which necessarily...

The degree of downside risk aversion (or equivalently prudence) is so far usually measured by -U'''/U''. We propose here another measure, U'''/U', which has interesting properties, different from those related to -U'''/U''. It also appears that the two measures are not mutually exclusive....

This paper introduces and investigates the concept of repetitive risk aversion. The risk aversion of an increasing and concave utility function is repetitive if the fear of ruin, which measures agent's aversion to risking his entire income, is also increasing and concave. This is shown to be...