Rethinking Risk Attitude: Aspiration as Pure Risk

Rethinking Risk Attitude: Aspiration as Pure Risk

Rethinking Risk: Aspiration as Pure Risk

There exists no satisfactory theory of risk in current normative decision theories. Notions based on utility curvature, loss aversion and probability weighting are derivative, cannot be applied to nonnumerical consequences, and are not psychologically intuitive. I develop Pure Risk theory which resolves these problems – it is consistent with existing normative theories, and both internalises an...

Rethinking risk

Volatility is the most widely used measure of risk but its relevance is questionable in many settings. For long-term investors, short-term volatility is a nuisance they just have to live with and disregard as much as possible. Tail risks, however, are critical because, although rare by definition, they have a large impact on terminal wealth. Using a comprehensive sample that spans over 19 count...

History-dependent risk attitude

We propose a model of history-dependent risk attitude (HDRA), allowing the attitude of a decision-maker (DM) towards risk at each stage of a T -stage lottery to evolve as a function of his history of disappointments and elations in prior stages. We establish an equivalence between the existence of an HDRA representation and two documented cognitive biases. First, the DM’s risk attitudes are rei...

Capturing Intrinsic Risk Attitude

The paper introduces a new concept of intrinsic risk attitude. In contrast to the common Arrow-Pratt measure, the present concept is directly tied to preferences on the multidimensional consumption space and is independent of the way we measure consumption, of the commodity under observation, and of market prices or liquidity constraints. The measure relies on intertemporal choice to distinguis...