Efficient contracts for sharing risk will allocate risk according to comparative advantage. When risks meet the typical criteria for insurability, in particular independence, the comparative advantage is straightforward and insurers are able to diversify risk by pooling together many...

Although financial pricing models imply that profits of property- liability insurance firms should conform to an unpredictable time series process, cycles are widely reported. Some controversy exists as to whether the "underwriting cycle" is a mere accounting artifact or whether it has real...

We consider the effects of changes in the distribution of a background risk on the optimal risk taking behaviour of a risk- averse decision maker. In particular, we suppose that the background risk deteriorates via a first- or second-degree stochastic dominance shift. Our contention is that such...

Risk aversion can be defined either by the negative sign of the second derivative of the utility function or by the rejection of any mean-preserving increase in risk. The more recent notions of prudence and temperance have so far been defined exclusively by the sign of the third and the fourth...

Since Fishburn and Porter [1976], it has been known that a first- order dominant shift in the distribution of random returns of an asset does not necessarily induce a risk-averse decision maker to increase his holdings of that improved asset. To obtain the desired comparative statics result, one...