The concept of absolute risk aversion proposed by K. Arrow (1965) and J. Pratt (1964) and the assumption that it is decreasing in wealth has played a central role in the analysis of risky choices. Ten years later S. Richard (1975) defined correlation aversion in the framework of bivariate...

To analyze the impact of background risks, decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA) must be combined with other restrictions on the shape of the utility function in order to make preferences risk vulnerable. In this note, we indicate that risk vulnerability can also be associated with the sole...

The relationship between willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce the probability of an adverse event and the degree of risk aversion is ambiguous. The ambiguity arises because paying for protection worsens the outcome in the event the adverse event occurs, which influences the expected marginal...

The degree of downside risk aversion (or equivalently prudence) is so far usually measured by -U'''/U''. We propose here another measure, U'''/U', which has interesting properties, different from those related to -U'''/U''. It also appears that the two measures are not mutually exclusive....