Economists ubiquitously employ a simple and elegant explanation for risk aversion: It derives from the concavity of the utility-of-wealth function within the expected-utility framework. We show that this explanation is not plausible in most applications, since anything more than economically...

In the standard model for insurance demand, the risk is totally exogenous and the insurance premium is paid for out of riskless wealth. This model yields results that are mostly in contradiction to everyday observation and have been used to question the pertinence of expected utility theory on...

In the standard model for insurance demand, the risk is totally exogenous and the insurance premium is paid for out of riskless wealth. This model yields results that are mostly in contradiction to everyday observation and have been used to question the pertinence of expected utility theory on...