J Derbyshire has recently repeated G L S Shackle's original attack on the concept of probability in a number of recent articles. He adds nothing new to Shackle's arguments of forty to eighty years ago that were completely refuted in 1959 by R. Weckstein, who based his refutation of Shackle on a...

We propose a test of Barberis and Huang's (2008) theory of skewness preferences. The probability weighting feature that is the basis of their theory relies on investors overweighting the probability of tail events. The resulting investor preferences for positive skewness in return distributions...

We evaluate the empirical validity of popular asset-pricing models in explicit consideration of statistical power, by employing the adaptive significance level and equal-probability test. Past studies often use samples from a large cross-section of portfolios over a long time period, conducting...

The price of any asset can be expressed with risk neutral probabilities, which are adjusted to incorporate risk preferences. This paper introduces the concepts of downside (respectively outer) risk neutral probabilities, which are adjusted to incorporate the preferences for downside (resp....

It has been in the literature since 1963 when Mandelbrot published The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices that returns on equity securities have heavy tails. In a 2014 article, Harris derives a mathematical reason these tails must be heavy. This proof in turn excludes mean-variance finance...

We show that there exists a probability measure under which the CAPM formula for expected returns holds for general utility functions and probability distributions. This probability measure, the ``downside risk neutral'' measure, is adjusted to incorporate the effects of downside risk and higher...

The classic deterrence theory model of income tax evasion first articulated in 1972 has met significant criticism because it does not comport with the observed rate of tax compliance. This article argues that the classic expected utility model and its various progeny, including nonexpected...