Diversification is a fundamental concept in economics, decision theory, and finance, but the way in which it is implemented in the real world varies greatly. This paper asks how elementary the notion of diversification is by studying whether children apply it as a choice heuristic. We report on...

Diversification is a fundamental concept in economics, decision theory and finance. It also lies at the core of the Darwinian evolution argument, and diversifying behavior known as bet-hedging has been widely documented in other species. The central premise of this paper is that attitudes...

Diversification is a fundamental concept in economics, finance, and decision theory. This paper argues that decision makers assign an intrinsic value to the notion of diversification and that this “willingness to pay” is driven by risk aversion and loss aversion. In an experimental study...

The principle of indifference states that events should be assigned equal probabilities if no reason can be given for regarding one event as more likely than another. This paper provides a normative argument for the principle of indifference based on a new formal model of decision under...

Multi-period measures of risk account for the path that the value of an investment portfolio takes. In the context of probabilistic risk measures, the focus has traditionally been on the magnitude of investment loss and not on the dimension associated with the passage of time. In this paper, the...

Abstract. This paper introduces a new model for decision making under ambiguity in the context of asset allocation called second-order uncertainty. I propose a quantification of uncertainty without ranking or evaluation of possible outcomes. Faced with a collection of choice alternatives, the...