Humans are notoriously bad at understanding probabilities, exhibiting a host of biases and distortions that are context dependent. This has serious consequences on how we assess risks and make decisions. Several theories have been developed to replace the normative rational expectation theory at...

An information transaction entails the purchase of information. Formally, it consists of an information structure together with a price. We develop an index of the appeal of information transactions, which is derived as a dual to the agent’s preferences for information. The index of...

Consider any investor who fears ruin facing any set of investments that satisfy noarbitrage. Before investing, he can purchase information about the state of nature in the form of an information structure. Given his prior, information structure α is more informative than information structure...

When a risky decision involves both skill and chance, success or failure is a signal of the decision maker's skill. Adopting standard models from the career concerns literature, we show that a rational desire to avoid looking unskilled may help explain several anomalies associated with prospect...

We consider individual’s portfolio selection problems. Introducing the concept of ambiguity, we show the existence of portfolio inertia under the assumptions that decision maker’s beliefs are captured by an inner measure, and that her preferences are represented by the Choquet integral with...

It is shown how to test revealed preference data on choices under uncertainty for consistency with first and second order stochastic dominance (FSD or SSD). The axiom derived for SSD is a necessary and sufficient condition for risk aversion. If an investor is risk averse, stochastic dominance...

It is well-known that various criteria for comparing aversion to real-outcome risks are equivalent. Some of this theory has been extended to Euclidean-outcome risks. We extend it further by:(a) filling the conceptual gaps, most notably by providing a criterion using our generalized Arrow-Pratt...

This study examines risk premia in a laboratory market featuring a long-lived asset. The research is enabled by prevention of the persistent bubbles and crashes endemic to laboratory markets utilizing long-lived assets. Positive, statistically significant risk premia are reported, in support of...

In this paper, we study two classical saving-insurance problems for the intertemporal version developed by Hayashi and Miao (2011) of the smooth ambiguity model of Klibanoff et al. (2005). These models put risk, ambiguity and time preferences together in a Kreps-Porteus aggregator, and...

The crisis of 2008 and 2009 exposed not only the shortcomings of our financial system but also the shortcomings of the tools used by financial advisors to assess and guide investors. These include risk questionnaires. Many investors who were assessed as risk tolerant in 2007 and assigned...