Supported by several recent investigations, the empirical pricing kernel (EPK) puzzle might be considered a stylized fact. Based on an economic model with state dependent preferences for the financial investors, we want to emphasize a microeconomic view that succeeds in explaining the puzzle. We...

A practical guide to constructing a long-term investment portfolio using the theory of expected utility as developed in Part I. Our goal here is to address the portfolio at the macro level of asset-class selection and scaling; more micro issues will be discussed in later notes. We see a special...

In this paper, I examine the decision-theoretic status of risk attitudes. I start by providing evidence showing that the risk attitude concepts do not play a major role in the axiomatic analysis of the classic models of decision-making under risk. This can be interpreted as reflecting the...

The paper reconstructs the history of the experimental attempts to measure the cardinal utility of money between 1950 and 1985 within the framework provided by expected utility theory (EUT). It is shown that this history displays a definite trajectory: from the confidence in EUT and the...

We address the problem of choosing a portfolio of policies under “deep uncertainty.” We introduce the idea of belief dominance as a way to derive a set of non-dominated portfolios and robust individual alternatives. Our approach departs from the tradition of providing a single recommended...

We study the problem of elicitation of subjective beliefs of an agent when the beliefs are ambiguous (the set of beliefs is a non-singleton set) and the agent's preference exhibits ambiguity aversion; in particular, as represented by alpha-maxmin preferences. We construct a direct revelation...

We study effects of correlation ambiguity on portfolio choice when the number of risky assets is large. We find that the optimal portfolio contains only a fraction of available risky assets. With 100 stocks randomly selected from the S&P 500, less than 20 stocks will be held in the optimal...

We consider the aggregation of individual agents' von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences over lotteries into a social planner's von Neumann-Morgenstern preference. We start from Harsanyi's axiomatization of utilitarianism, and ask under which conditions a social preference order that satisfies...

Nearly all life-cycle models adopt Yaari's (1965) assumption that individuals know the survival probabilities that they face. Given that an individual's exact survival probabilities are likely unknown, we explore the implications of relaxing this assumption. If there is no annuity market, then...