This paper re-examines precautionary saving with general Selden/Kreps-Porteus preferences. The conditions existing in the literature are much more complex than in the Expected Utility framework. We obtain a simple and intuitive result on precautionary savings via disentangling time preference and risk preference effects.

On average, “young”people underestimate whereas “old”people overestimate their chances to survive into the future. We adopt a Bayesian learning model of ambiguous survival beliefs which replicates these patterns. The model is embedded within a non-expected utility model of life-cycle consumption and saving. Our analysis shows that agents with ambiguous survival beliefs (i) save less than origin...

We study agents whose expected utility preferences are interdependent for informational or psychological reasons. We characterize when two types can be “strategically distinguished” in the sense that they are guaranteed to behave differently in some finite mechanism. We show that two types are strategically distinguishable if and only if they have different hierarchies of interdependent prefere...

The paper exammes the optimal behavior of a smgle dealer who 1s faced with a stochastic demand to trade (modeled by a continuous time Pmsson Jump process) and facmg return risk on his stock and on the rest of his portfolio (modeled by diffusion processes). Usmg stochastic dynamic programmmg, we dertve the optimal bid and ask prices that maxnmze the dealer’s expected utility of termmal wealth as...

CONTENTS Executive Summary........................................................

In random incentive mechanisms agents choose from multiple problems and a randomization device selects a single problem to determine payment. Agents are assumed to act as if they faced each problem on its own. While this approach is valid when agents are expected utility maximizers, ambiguity-averse agents may use the randomization device to hedge and thereby contaminate the data.

We develop awareness-dependent subjective expected utility by taking unawareness structures introduced in Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper (2006, 2008, 2009) as primitives in the Anscombe-Aumann approach to subjective expected utility. We observe that a decision maker is unaware of an event if and only if her choices reveal that the event is “null” and the negation of the event is “null”. Moreover,...

We investigate the impact of a non-financial background risk ε̃ on the preference rankings between two independent financial risks z̃1 and z̃2 for an expected-utility maximizer. More precisely, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the alternative (x0 + z̃1, y0 + ε̃) to be preferred to (x0 + z̃2, y0 + ε̃) whenever (x0 + z̃1, y0) is preferred to (x0 + z̃2, y0). Utility functions that preserv...