Prospect theory is currently the main descriptive theory of decision under uncertainty. It generalizes expected utility by introducing nonlinear decision weighting and loss aversion. A difficulty in the study of multiattribute utility under prospect theory is to determine when an attribute yields a gain or a loss. One possibility, which has been adopted in the existing theoretical literature on...

A behavioral representative investor who evaluates a single risky asset based on cumulative prospect theory will often induce high kurtosis, negative skewness, and persistent autocorrelation into the distribution of market returns even if the asset payoffs are merely a sequence of independent coin tosses. These findings continue to hold even when the investor is simply loss averse.

In previous models of (cumulative) prospect theory reference-dependence of preferences is imposed beforehand and the location of the reference point is exogenously determined. This note provides a foundation of prospect theory, where reference-dependence is derived from preference conditions and a unique reference point arises endogenously.