We study various decision problems regarding short‐term investments in risky assets whose returns evolve continuously in time. We show that in each problem, all risk‐averse decision makers have the same (problem‐dependent) ranking over short‐term risky assets. Moreover, in each problem,...

Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk—heritable risk—in which there is a positive correlation between...

Experimental evidence suggests that people tend to be overconfident in the sense that they overestimate the accuracy of their private information. In this paper, we show that risk-averse principals might prefer overconfident agents in various strategic interactions because these agents help...

Demichelis & Weibull (AER 2008) show that adding lexicographic lying costs to coordination games with cheap talk yields a sharp prediction: only the efficient outcome is evolutionarily stable. I show that this result is caused by the discontinuity of preferences rather than by small lying costs...

A leading solution concept in the evolutionary study of extensive-form games is Selten (1983) notion of limit ESS. This note demonstrates that a limit ESS does not imply neutral stability, and that it may be dynamically unstable (almost any small perturbation takes the population away). These...