Define the riskiness of a gamble as the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion (ARA) of an individual with constant ARA who is indifferent between taking and not taking that gamble. We characterize this index by axioms, chief among them a “duality” axiom which, roughly speaking, asserts...

How does risk tolerance vary with stake size? This important question cannot be adequately answered if framing effects, nonlinear probability weighting, and heterogeneity of preference types are neglected. We show that the increase in relative risk aversion over gains cannot be captured by the...

This paper develops an axiomatic theory of decision making under uncertainty that dispenses with the state space. The results are subjective expected utility models with unique, action-dependent, subjective probabilities, and a utility function defined over wealth-effect pairs that is unique up...

In this article we propose a two stage procedure to model demand decisions by customers who are balancing several dimensions of a product. We then test our procedure by analyzing the behavior of buyers from an Austrian price comparison site. Although in such a market a consumer will typically...

Although examples of deception and fraud in business have generated widespread interest in themotivations for honest behavior, little is known about individual differences in the propensity totell the truth. This paper highlights the role of honesty as a protected value, maintaining thatsome...

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in whichcorporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show thatrms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors usingthe timing of corporate...

Transport policy research seeks to predict and substantially reduce the future transport-related greenhouse gasemissions and fuel consumption to prevent negative climate change impacts and protect the environment.However, making such predictions is made difficult due to the uncertainties...

We prove that under very weak conditions optimal financial products have to be co-monotone with the inverted state price density. Optimality is meant in the sense of the maximization of an arbitrary preference model, e.g. Expected Utility Theory or Prospect Theory. The proof is based on methods...

We propose a new continuous time framework to study asset prices under learning and ambiguity aversion. In a partial information Lucas economy with time additive power utility, a discount for ambiguity arises if and only if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) is above one. Then,...

The economic concept of the second-best involves the idea that multiple simultaneous deviations from a hypothetical first-best optimum may be optimal once the first-best itself can no longer be achieved, since one distortion may partially compensate for another. Within an evolutionary framework,...