More than thirty years ago, Charnes, Cooper and Schinnar (1976) established an enlightening contact between economic production functions (EPFs) -- a cornerstone of neoclassical economics -- and information theory, showing how a generalization of the Cobb-Douglas production function encodes...

The objective of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the driving forces of a life insurance company. More specifically, the issues of the duration and convexity of insurance liabilities and equity are addressed. These issues deserve a careful rethinking given the recent...

This paper provides a continuous-time analysis of the optimal insurance demand by individuals. A joint treatment of the insurance, consumption and portfolio decisions is presented using a framework à la Merton (1969, 1971). The individual optimal insurance demand is explicitly derived under the...

Many papers in the litterature have adopted the expected utility paradigm to analyze insurancedecisions. Insurance companies manage policies by growing, by adding independent risks.Even if adding risks generally ultimately decreases the probability of insolvency, the impacton the insurer's...

In this paper, we consider a décision-maker facing a financial risk flanked by a backgroundrisk, possibly non-financial, such as health or environmental risk. A decision has to be madeabout the amount of an investment (in the financial dimension) resulting in a future benefiteither in the same...

In this paper we propose benchmark values for the coefficients of relative risk aversionand relative prudence on the basis of a binary choice model where the decision makerchooses between aggregating or disaggregating multiplicative risks. We relate ourresults to the decision maker's willingness...

Decisions under risk are often multidimensional, where the preferences of the decision maker depend on several attributes. For example, an individual might be concerned about both her level of wealth and the condition of her health. Many times the signs of successive cross derivatives of a...

How does risk affect saving? Empirical work typically examines the effects of detectible differences in risk within the data. How these differences affect saving in theoretical models depends on the metric one uses for risk. For labor-income risk, second-degree increases in risk require prudence...