We develop a nonparametric procedure, called the lattice method, for testing the consistency of contingent consumption data with a broad class of models of choice under risk and under uncertainty. Our method allows for risk loving and elation seeking behavior and can be used to calculate, via...

Estimating risk preferences is tricky because controlling for confounding factors is difficult. Omitting or imperfectly controlling for these factors can attribute too much observable behavior to risk aversion and bias estimated preferences. Agents often modify risky decisions in response to...

We establish a class of fully nonlinear conditional expectations. Similarly to the usage of linear expectations when a probabilistic description of uncertainty is present, we observe analogue quantitative and qualitative properties. The type of nonlinearity captures the agents sentiments of...

The alpha-maxmin model is a prominent example of preferences under Knightian uncertainty as it allows to distinguish ambiguity and ambiguity attitude. These preferences are dynamically inconsistent for nontrivial versions of α. In this paper, we derive a recursive, dynamically consistent...

Based on recent discoveries in economics, neuroscience, and psychology, we hypothesize that pure exposure to high-payoff or low-payoff gambles can change people’s subsequent reported valuations of gambles and confirm this hypothesis in a laboratory experiment. In particular, the same...

We relate time-varying aggregate ambiguity (V-VSTOXX) to individual investor trading. We use the trading records of more than 100,000 individual investors from a large German online brokerage from March 2010 to December 2015. We find that an increase in ambiguity is associated with increased...

The literature typically attributes the Allais Paradox to a violation of the Independence Axiom. We present experimental data showing that violations of the Reduction of Compound Lotteries Axiom are significantly more problematic, and our findings are robust to both choice and pricing tasks. We...

This paper studies the relation between concavity, stochastic or state dependent utility functions, and risk aversion. Using the common definition of risk aversion, but modified for state dependent preferences, we show that concavity does not imply risk aversion. Instead, it implies a weaker...

We discuss the selection of the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. More specifically, we examine in an expected utility framework how the uncertainty on the growth rate of the GNP per head affects this rate. Under...

For choice with deterministic consequences, the standard rationality hypothesis is ordinality, i.e., maximization of a weak preference ordering. For choice under risk (resp. uncertainty), preferences are assumed to be represented by the objectively (resp. subjectively) expected value of a von...