The economic theory of decision making under risk has seen remarkable advances over the 50 years since Pratt’s (1964) characterization of risk aversion under expected utility. We review developments in three key areas to which Louis Eeckhoudt has made significant contributions: (1) increases...

The Precautionary Principle has provided the foundations for building a new risk regulatory pattern under scientific uncertainty. This paper investigates how classical economic theory may, or may not, justify the Precautionary Principle. It examines the link between irreversibility, the prospect...

Since Fishburn and Porter (1976), it has been known that a first-order dominant shift in the distribution of random returns of an asset does not necessarily induce a risk-averse decision maker to increase his holdings of that improved asset. To obtain the desired comparative statics result, one...

In this paper we address the problem of determining whether adding independent risks or subdividing them is a good substitute for insurance. Despite the fact that accepting more i.i.d. risks increases total risk, it is shown that some risk-averse decision makers can rationally reduce their...

This paper offers interpretations and applications of the “fear of ruin” coefficient (Aumann and Kurz, 1977, Econometrica). This coefficient is useful for analyzing the behavior of expected utility maximizers when they face binary lotteries with the same worse outcome. Comparative statics...

Evaluation of projects that affect mortality risk usually assumes that risk changes are small and similar across individuals. In reality, risks differ among individuals and information about risk heterogeneity determines the extent to which affected lives are “statistical” or...

The Willingness-to-Pay approach is the basic justification for the use of the Contingent Valuation method to evaluate public mortality risk reduction programs. However, aggregating unweighted willingness-to-pay is a valid method only when individuals have the same marginal value of money, an...

Holding more of the riskless asset and insuring the risky asset are two ways to reduce portfolio risk. These methods can be employed jointly. As a result, the amount of insurance selected to indemnify against possible losses from holding a risky asset depends, in general, on the quantities of...

Models of the insurance markets and institutions are routinely based on expected utility. Since EU is being challenged by an increasing number of decision models, we examine whether EU-based models are robust in their predictions. To do so, we rework some basic models of optimal insurance...