IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joecth/v15y2000i2p469-476.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Parametric characterizations of risk aversion and prudence

Author

Listed:
  • Lars Tyge Nielsen

    (INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, F-77305 Fontainebleau Cedex, FRANCE)

  • Fatma Lajeri

    (Ko\cc--> University, Istinye, 80860 Istanbul, TURKEY)

Abstract

Our first main result says that whether one decision maker is more risk averse than another can be determined from their attitudes toward a given two-parameter family of risks. When all risks belong to this family, risk aversion can be compared even when initial wealth is random. Our second main result solves a long-standing problem in mean-variance analysis: what is the interpretation of the concavity of utility as a function of mean and variance? We show that in the case of normal distributions, this utility function is concave if and only if the agent has decreasing prudence.

Suggested Citation

  • Lars Tyge Nielsen & Fatma Lajeri, 2000. "Parametric characterizations of risk aversion and prudence," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 15(2), pages 469-476.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:joecth:v:15:y:2000:i:2:p:469-476
    Note: Received: July 29, 1996; revised: October 2, 1998
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00199/papers/0015002/00150469.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Risk aversion; Prudence.;

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:joecth:v:15:y:2000:i:2:p:469-476. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.