Failure is embarrassing. In gambles involving both skill and chance, we show that a strategic desire to avoid appearing unskilled generates behavioral anomalies consistent with prospect theory’s concepts of loss aversion, framing effects, and probability weighting. Based on models from the career concerns literature that formalize early social psychology models of risk taking, the results show ...

This paper derives conditions under which the standard decomposition of unconditional expected utility into marginal probabilities and conditional expected utilities generalizes to Cumulative Prospect Theory. The results are relevant for empirical analyses in which marginal probabilities are used as explanatory variables.

We solve a liquidation problem for an agent with preferences consistent with the prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979). We find that the agent is willing to hold a risky project with a relatively inferior Sharpe ratio if the project is currently making losses, and intends to liquidate it when it breaks even. On the other hand, the agent may liquidate a project with a relatively superio...