Loss aversion postulates that people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains of equal size. It is a central part of prospect theory and, according to Daniel Kahneman, "the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics" (Kahneman, 2011, p. 300). It has powerful...

Loss aversion postulates that people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains of equal size. It is a central part of prospect theory and, according to Daniel Kahneman, "the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics" (Kahneman, 2011, p. 300). It has powerful...

Loss aversion postulates that people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains of equal size. It is a central part of prospect theory and, according to Daniel Kahneman, “the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics” (Kahneman, 2011, p. 300). It has powerful...

We construct a model that considers the direct effects, if any, of government spending on the attitudes of a typical consumer toward risk, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. The null hypothesis is that a growing government sector does not affect the consumer's behavior, and the...

This note explores the mathematical theory to solve modern gambler’s ruin problems. We establish a ruin framework and solve for the probability of bankruptcy. We also show how this relates to the expected time to bankruptcy and review the risk neutral probabilities associated an adjustment to...

In this paper we show that the wildly popular Holt and Laury (2002) risk preference elicitation method confounds estimates of the curvature of the utility function, the traditional notion of risk preference, with an estimate of the extent to which an individual weights probabilities...

Decisions of investing in sovereign assets involve both risk and ambiguity. Ambiguity arises from unknown elements characterizing the value of a generic sovereign. In presence of ambiguity, ambiguity-averse investors are prone to pay for obtaining summary information such as ratings which...

As well as consolidating on the existing literature on fair value accounting, by way of reference to jurisdictional analyses which include a focus on China, Japan, Brazil, and South Africa, this paper not only highlights why there is need for a re-think of the use of fair values as the primary...

Despite the fact that conceptual models of individual decision making under risk are deterministic, attempts to econometrically estimate risk preferences require some assumption about the stochastic nature of choice. Unfortunately, the consequences of making different assumptions are, at...

Support for genetic modification in agriculture mainly stems from approval of food and agricultural goals. It is facilitated by trust in the judgment of scientific authorities and undermined by anxiety about the risks involved. But there are symptoms of danger: Any public opinion data that show...