Maximizing the probability of bypassing an aspiration level, and taking increasing risks to recover previous losses are well-documented behavioral tendencies. They are compatible with individual utility functions that are S-shaped, as suggested in Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). We...

Recently, Caballi and Pomansky (1996) proposed a formal definition of mixed risk aversion and characterized stochastic dominance in presence of such utility functions. However they did not study comparative mixed risk aversion. In this note we give a sufficient condition for analytic comparative...

We introduce a simple measure of risk aversion in the large. Besides satisfying properties which are conceptually analogous to the usual properties of the Arrow-Pratt measure, the index of risk aversion in the large leads to a stronger concept of decreasing risk aversion, which necessarily imp...