Due to their underlying assumptions, the standard concepts of risk aversion and preference for the present are generally defined separately and represented by scalar measures, and this implies many shortcomings. More specifically, if measured by a scalar, the risk aversion remains unchanged, whatever type of riskis considered. Consequently, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a morecomplete analysis of aversions, which clearly emphasizes the multidimensionalityof risk aversion and the necessity for the measures of risk aversion and preferencefor the present to be defined jointly. This will be done by considering a general framework allowing not only to address these important issues, but also to discuss other basic concepts such as the certainty direction and the preference for liquidity. Our model also allows to analyze income shocks in two different settings, that is, when the individual can financially adjust himself and when he cannot. These two settings lead to the definition of various generalized aversions and to how they are linked together. Our main findings are that these generalized aversion measures are multidimensional and invariant with respect to monotonic transformations of the utility function.
