The most popular models of decision making use a single criteria to evaluate projects or lotteries. However, decision makers may actually consider multiple criteria when evaluating projects. We consider a dual criteria model from psychology. This model integrates the familiar tradeoffs between...

Longitudinal experiments allow one to evaluate the temporal stability of latent preferences, but raise concerns about sample selection and attrition that may confound inferences about temporal stability. We evaluate the hypothesis of temporal stability in risk preferences using a remarkable data...

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 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...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

This study compares the performance of Prospect Theory versus Stochastic Expected Utility Theory at fitting data on decision making under risk. Both theories incorporate well-known deviations from Expected Utility Maximization such as the Allais paradox or the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes....

It has long been recognized that there is considerable heterogeneity in individual risk taking behavior but little is known about the distribution of risk taking types. We present a parsimonious characterization of risk taking behavior by estimating a finite mixture regression model for three...