A benchmarking procedure ranks real-valued acts by the probability that they outperform a benchmark B; that is, an act f is evaluated by means of the functional V(f) = P(f B). Expected utility is a special case of benchmarking procedure, where the acts and the benchmark are stochastically...

This paper describes a parametric family of utility functions for decision analysis. The parameterization is obtained by embedding the HARA class in a four-parameter representation for the risk aversion function. The resulting utility functions have only four shapes: concave, convex, S-shaped,...