In the standard model for insurance demand, the risk is totally exogenous and the insurance premium is paid for out of riskless wealth. This model yields results that are mostly in contradiction to everyday observation and have been used to question the pertinence of expected utility theory on...

Much of the traditional economic theory of insurance is based on the assumption that the risk against which insurance is to be purchased is entirely exogenous. This is usually modelled by simply allowing the individual to include insurance as a mechanism of covering risk, without any real...

Traditionally, downside risk aversion is the study of the placement of a pure risk (a secondary risk) on either the upside or the downside of a primary two-state risk. When the decision maker prefers to have the secondary risk placed on the upside rather than the downside of the primary lottery,...

In this note we show that the measure of intensity of downside risk aversion proposed recently by Crainich and Eeckhoudt (2007) cannot be guaranteed to exist. We do this by means of an example in which the existence of the measure depends upon the values of the parameters in the problem.