This paper reports the results of a detailed investigation of the risk-averse and loss-averse behaviour of UK individual investors. An one-period analytical model of investing behaviour is developed to explore the differences between individuals who are risk averse, and those whose behaviour is better described by Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory. Questionnaire data on risk perceptions is u...

We address the problem of hedging inventory risk for a short lifecycle or seasonal item when its demand is correlated with the price of a financial asset. We show how to construct optimal hedging transactions that minimize the variance of profit and increase the expected utility for a risk-averse decision-maker. We show that for a wide range of hedging strategies and utility functions, a risk-a...

Heterogeneously risk-averse individuals who lack access to formal insurance build and use relationships with each other to manage risk. I show that the composition of equilibrium relationships under pairwise matching and when group size is endogenous is determined by a mean-variance trade-o¤ across di¤erentially risky productive opportunities, though output distributions may have in…nitely-many...

Accident Risk, Gender, Family Status and Occupational Choice in the UK Many studies show that women are more risk averse than men. In this paper, following DeLeire and Levy (2004) for the US, we use family structure as a proxy for the degree of risk aversion to test the proposition that those with strong aversion to risk will make occupational choices biased towards safer jobs. In line with DeL...

In this paper, we extend a recently proposed scenario decomposition algorithm (Ahmed (2013)) for risk-neutral 0-1 stochastic programs to the risk-averse setting. Specifically, we consider risk-averse 0-1 stochastic programs with objective functions based on coherent risk measures. Using a dual representation of a coherent risk measure, we first derive an equivalent minimax reformulation of the ...

It is widely accepted among axiomatic bargaining theorists that if one bargainer is more risk averse than a second, the second will be a tougher bargaining opponent than the first against all opponents. We argue that this relationship between risk aversion and bargaining toughness is both highly fragile, and more nuanced than previously articulated. In the Nash and Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining ...

This paper seeks to examine the competitive behavior of the Brazilian banking industry by conducting an analysis at the level of individual banks to gain an understanding of how the risk-taking behaviors of banks are affected by their degree of market power. Our results suggest that the Brazilian banking industry is characterized by monopolistic competition. Our foremost finding is that the mar...

Why Do Some Motorbike Riders Wear a Helmet and Others Don’t? Evidence from Delhi, India We focus on helmet use behavior among motorbike users in Delhi. We use a detailed data set collected for the purpose of the study. To guide our empirical analysis, we rely on a simple model in which drivers decide on self-protection and self-insurance. The empirical findings suggest that risk averse drivers ...

This study investigates the channel coordination issue of a supply chain with a risk-neutral manufacturer and a loss-averse retailer facing stochastic demand that is sensitive to sales effort. Under the loss-averse newsvendor setting, a distribution-free gain/loss-sharing-and-buyback (GLB) contract has been shown to be able to coordinate the supply chain. However, we find that a GLB contract re...