The purpose of this note is to analyze properties of the risk lovers? utility function beyond the positive sign of its second order derivative. We show that??contrarily to a priori beliefs??risk lovers are prudent and are willing to accumulate precautionary savings.

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...