The paper shows that financial market equilibria need not exist if agents possess cumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. The reason is an infiniteshort-selling problem. But even when a short-sell constraint is added, non-existence can occur due to...

Natural catastrophes attract regularly the attention of media and have become a source of public concern. From a financial viewpoint, natural catastrophes represent idiosyncratic risks,diversifiable at the world level. But for reasons analyzed in this pap er reinsurance markets are unable to...

We study properties of structured financial products optimizing a utility functional of a customer. The conventional method may have the disadvantage that the a priori restriction to a certain number of assets could make it impossible to find the optimal portfolio. So instead of optimizing the...

We conduct controlled experiments in order to analyze individual trading behavior. Our results suggest that investors measure their gains relative to their initial wealth, and that this reference point together with past stock price changes determine the portfolio choices. Subjects choose a...

We analyze the investment behavior of private clients concerning structured products. To ascertain their stated and revealed preferences, we use a questionnaire and a field experiment, respectively. The real product issued in the field experiment is comparable to one product in the questionnaire...

This paper sheds light on the influence of exchange rate volatility on foreign direct investment (FDI), both at the theoretical and the empirical level. The novelty of the empirical analysis, which is based on a panel of 27 OECD countries over the period 1982-2002, is to provide evidence of a...

The wealth dynamics of insurance companies strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavorable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity...

We observe that the standard variant of Prospect Theory cannot describe very risk-averse choices in simple lotteries. This makes it diffcult to accommodate it with experimental data. Using an exponential value function can solve this problem and allows to cover the whole spectrum of risk-averse...

This paper argues that observations of non-stationary choice behavior need notnecessarily imply specific properties of the individual’s discount function. As weshow, the observed “anomalies” in intertemporal choice can alternatively be explained by an individual’s perception of the risk...

This study investigates loss aversion when the reference point is state-dependent.Using a state-dependent structure, prospects are more attractive if they depend positively on the reference point and are less attractive in case of negative dependence. In addition, the structure is neutral in the...