Although the link between risk aversion and diminishing marginal utility of wealth is academically well established, theoretical discussions concerning its empirical validity remain. The presented, review-type paper aims to briefly examine theoretical roots responsible for the different views on...

Expected utility functions are limited to second-order (conditional) risk aversion, while non-expected utility functions can exhibit either first-order or second-order (conditional) risk aversion. We extend the concept of orders of conditional risk aversion to orders of conditional dependent...

How should you choose between risky options? This paper proposes reckoning, defined as the expectation for the lower of two draws from a variable's distribution. In symbols this is E[min(X_1,X_2)]. This is a special case of rank-dependent expected utility and provides a tractable alternative to...

The equilibrium prices in asset markets, as stated by Keynes (1930), "...will be fixed at the point at which the sales of the bears and the purchases of the bulls are balanced." We propose a descriptive theory of finance explicating Keynes' claim that the prices of assets today equilibrate the...

This paper focuses on the attitude of non-professional investors towards financial losses and their decisions on wealth allocation, and how these change subject to behavioral factors. Our contribution concerns the integration of behavioral elements into the classic portfolio optimization....

We relate time-varying aggregate ambiguity (V-VSTOXX) to individual investor trading. We use the trading records of more than 100,000 individual investors from a large German online brokerage from March 2010 to December 2015. We find that an increase in ambiguity is associated with increased...

Most decisions concerning (self-)insurance and self-protection have to be taken in situations in which a) the effort exerted precedes the moment uncertainty realises, and b) the probabilities of future states of the world are not perfectly known. By integrating these two characteristics in a...

In this paper, expected utility, defined by a Taylor series expansion around expected wealth, is maximized. The coefficient of relative risk aversion (CRRA) that is commensurate with a 100% investment in the risky asset is simulated. The following parameters are varied: the riskless return, the...

Prominent models such as maxmin expected utility/alpha-multiprior (MEU/ a -MP) and Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (KMM) interpret ambiguity aversion as aversion against second-order risks associated with ambiguous acts. We design an experiment where the decision maker draws twice with...

We develop a nonparametric procedure, called the lattice method, for testing the consistency of contingent consumption data with a broad class of models of choice under risk and under uncertainty. Our method allows for risk loving and elation seeking behavior and can be used to calculate, via...