The seminal work of Mandelbrot and Fama, carried out in the sixties, suggested the class of alpha-stable laws as a probabilistic model of financial assets returns. Stable distributions possess several properties which make plausible their application in the field of finance - heavy tails, excess...

This paper examines the properties that a risk measure should satisfy in order to characterize an investor's preferences. In particular, we propose some intuitive and realistic examples that describe several desirable features of an ideal risk measure. This analysis is the first step in...