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...

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...

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...

We investigate what it means for one act to be more ambiguous than another. The question is evidently analogous to asking what makes one prospect riskier than another, but beliefs are neither objective nor representable by a unique probability. Our starting point is an abstract class of...

We consider individual's portfolio selection problems. Introducing the concept of ambiguity, we show the existence of portfolio inertia under the assumptions that decision maker's beliefs are captured by an inner measure, and that her preferences are represented by the Choquet integral with...

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...