This chapter of a collective book aims at presenting the basics of decision making under risk. We first define notions of risk and increasing risk and recall definitions and classifications (that are valid independently of any representation) of behavior under risk. We then review the classical...

Global environmental phenomena like climate change, major extinction events or flutype pandemics can have catastrophic consequences. By properly assessing the outcomes involved - especially those concerning human life - economic theory of choice under uncertainty is expected to help people take...

Since von Neuman and Morgenstern's (1944) contribution to game theory, a rational decision maker will rank risky prospects according to the celebrated Expected utility criterion. This method takes lotteries i.e. (simple) probability distributions to represent risky prospects. If the decision...

In this paper we want to explore an argumentative pattern that provides a normative justification for expected utility functions grounded on empirical evidence, showing how it worked in three different episodes of their development. The argument claims that we should prudentially maximize our...

In this paper, a fully choice-based theory of disappointment is developed. It encompasses, as particular cases, EU theory, Gul's theory of disappointment (1991) and the models of Loomes and Sugden (1986). According to the new theory, the risk premium of a random prospect is the sum of two...

If an investor does care for utilities -and not for monetary outcomes- stochastic dominances should be expressed in terms of utility units ("utils"). If so, any "rational" investor may be characterized by an elementary utility function -called canonical utility function- which is such that the...

Although it is endowed with many interesting properties, the theory of decision-making under risk by Loomes and Sugden [1986] has never been given an axiomatics. In this paper, we make up for this omission because their lottery-dependent functional is endowed with many interesting properties to...

This paper elaborates an axiomatic treatment of the Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) model that dispenses with the assumption of an exogenous state space. Within a state-free description of uncertainty and alternatives, axioms for preferences are formulated and shown to characterize the...

This paper proposes an experiment about the attitude toward probabilities on a population of portfolio managers. Its aim is to check whether or not portfolio managers are neutral toward probabilities. Meanwhile, it presents a experimental protocole that highlights an inconsistency between two...

This paper provides a general framework for a unifying treatment of stochastic dominance of any degree and of any type (direct or inverse for each final or intermediary level). It gives the conditions for the congruence between stochastic dominance and classes of utility functions in this...