Do entrepreneurs consider the risk of their business equity when making investment portfolio allocations? Many people compartmentalize different risks and consider them separately, called mental accounting. Alternatively, the risk substitution hypothesis suggests that entrepreneurs would offset...

The French "2010 Household Wealth Survey" includes an experimental module that makes it possible to measure risk aversion in an objective manner. Using this survey, we analyse workers’ attitudes towards financial participation with respect to their attitudes towards risk.

Individual decision-making is naturally subjected to various micro and macroeconomic policies of the government. Choice of schooling by an individual is also affected by such public policies. We show that the distribution of individuals in a scale of risk aversion, ex post, is strongly...

This note provides an alternative derivation of the leximin principle using the framework of Harsanyi’s (1953) equi-probability model. We demonstrate that the leximin principle is concluded if and only if the preference ordering of the impartial observer obeys strong monotonicity and complete...

This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being...

This Paper examines how aversion to risk and aversion to intertemporal substitution determines the strength of the precautionary saving motive in a two-period model with Kreps-Porteus preferences. For small risks, we derive a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive, which...

We propose a criterion to rank poverty measures on the basis of distribution-sensitivity. The criterion compares reactions to ‘lossy’ transfers among the poor. We focus on the class of rank-dependent poverty measures and provide distribution-sensitivity rankings of the poverty gap ratio, the...

Prospect theory suggests that risk seeking can occur when investors face losses and thus an S-shaped utility function can be useful in explaining investor behavior. Using stochastic dominance procedures, Post and Levy (2015) find evidence of reverse S-shaped utility functions. This is consistent...

In this paper we formulate an infinitely repeated Principal-Agent relationship as a Multi-Objective Optimization problem. We numerically approximate the solution of this model using a Multi-Objective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithm, named RankMOEA, for different values of the Agent's...

We propose a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model where a risk aversion shock enters a separable utility function. We analyze five periods, each one lasting twenty years, to follow over time the dynamics of several parameters (such as the risk aversion parameter),...