This paper presents a novel and unique measure of cross-sectional uncertainty constructed from stock options on individual firms. Cross-sectional varied little between 1980 1995 subsequently had three distinct peaks—during the tech boom, financial crisis, coronavirus epidemic. has mixed relationship with overall economic activity, aggregate is much more powerful for forecasting growth. The data...

We provide a necessary and a sufficient condition on an individual’s expected utility function under which any zero-mean idiosyncratic risk increases cautiousness (the derivative of the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion), which is the key determinant for this individual’s demand for options and portfolio insurance. JEL Classification Codes: D51, D58, D81, G11, G12, G13.

Committee decision making is examined in this study focusing on the role assigned to the committee members. In particular, we are concerned about the comparison between committee performance under specialization and non-specialization of the decision makers. JEL Classification number: D81, D71

We show that a steeply increasing workload before a deadline is compatible with time-consistent preferences. The key departure from the literature is that we consider a stochastic environment where success of effort is not guaranteed. JEL Classification: D91, J22, D81, D11.

This paper develops choice-theoretic foundations of the principal’s and agent’s behaviors that underlie the parameterized distribution formulation of agency theory. Both the principal and the agent are subjective expected utility maximizers and their actiondependent subjective probabilities are defined directly on the outcomes. The results are used to interpret and evaluate the common prior ass...

This paper develops an axiomatic theory of decision making under uncertainty that dispenses with the state space. The results are subjective expected utility models with unique, action-dependent, subjective probabilities, and a utility function defined over wealth-effect pairs that is unique up to positive linear transformation. JEL classification code: D81

Ellsberg’s experiment is extended to study the association between ambiguity aversion and violation of reduction of compound lotteries. It is shown that the two phenomena are strongly associated. Further analysis reveals two di¤erent forms of association, which correspond to alternative theoretical models that account for ambiguity attitudes. JEL Classi…cation: D81, C91.

This paper reviews the results from experimental measures of risk aversion for evidence of systematic differences in the behavior of men and women. In most studies, women are found to be more averse to risk than men. Studies with contextual frames show less consistent results. JEL Codes: C91, D81, J16

Partially specified probabilities induce coherent risk measures of a special kind. These measures are axiomatized using the four axioms that characterize coherent risk measures and an additional one, which requires that the risk measure be additive on the set of efficient portfolios. Journal of Economic Literature classification numbers: C61, C72, D81, D82, D83