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The analysis of optimal risk sharing has been thus far largely restricted to non-expected utility models with concave utility functions, where concavity is an expression of ambiguity aversion and/or risk aversion. This paper extends the analysis to α-maxmin expected utility, Choquet expected utility, and Cumulative Prospect Theory, which accommodate ambiguity seeking and risk seeking attitudes. We introduce a novel methodology of quasidifferential calculus of Demyanov and Rubinov (1986, 1992) and argue that it is particularly well-suited for the analysis of these three classes of utility functions which are neither concave nor differentiable. We provide characterizations of quasidifferentials of these utility functions, derive first-order conditions for Pareto optimal allocations under uncertainty, and analyze implications of these conditions for risk sharing with and without aggregate risk.

We report a portfolio-choice experiment that enables us to estimate parametric models of ambiguity aversion at the level of the individual subject. The assets are Arrow securities that correspond to three states of nature, where one state is risky with known probability and two states are ambiguous with unknown probabilities. We estimate two specifications of ambiguity aversion, one kinked and one smooth, that encompass many of the theoretical models in the literature. Each specification includes two parameters: one for ambiguity attitudes and another for risk attitudes. We also estimate a three-parameter specification that includes an additional parameter for pessimism/optimism (underweighting/overweighting the probabilities of different payoffs). The parameter estimates for individual subjects exhibit considerable heterogeneity. We cannot reject the null hypothesis of subjective expected utility for a majority of subjects. Most of the remaining subjects exhibit statistically significant ambiguity aversion or seeking and/or pessimism or optimism.

The goal of fuzzy portfolio selection is to make a combination of securities which can maximize the return or minimize the risk. Most of existing studies assumed that the investor has all the cash in hand and no securities position before portfolio optimization, which is sometimes inconsistent to reality. Besides, many studies are based on expected utility theory, which is in conflict with the behavior of some investors and may also lead to over-concentration of capital. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a fuzzy portfolio selection model based on three-way decision and cumulative prospect theory, which can mitigate the two shortcomings mentioned above. In this model, every action in the action set to the candidate securities is assigned to a prospect value and we can construct a tri-partition of the candidate securities according to three-way decision theory. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we adopted two case studies on the basis of real market data. The experimented results prove that the using of three-way decision and cumulative prospect theory increases the investment return, meanwhile, reduces the risk for the investor.

We study preferences over lotteries in which both the prize and the payment date are uncertain. In particular, a time lottery is one in which the prize is fixed but the date is random. With Expected Discounted Utility, individuals must be risk seeking over time lotteries (RSTL). In an incentivized experiment, however, we find that almost all subjects violate this property. Our main contributions are theoretical. We first show that within a very broad class of models, which includes many forms of nonexpected utility and time discounting, it is impossible to accommodate even a single violation of RSTL without also violating a property we termed Stochastic Impatience, a risky counterpart of standard Impatience. We then present two positive results. If one wishes to maintain Stochastic Impatience, violations of RSTL can be accommodated by keeping Independence within periods while relaxing it across periods. If, instead, one is willing to forego Stochastic Impatience, violations of RSTL can be accommodated with a simple generalization of Expected Discounted Utility, obtained by imposing only the behavioral postulates of Discounted Utility and Expected Utility.

We propose a robust method of discrete choice analysis when agents’ choice sets are unobserved. Our core model assumes nothing about agents’ choice sets apart from their minimum size. Importantly, it leaves unrestricted the dependence, conditional on observables, between choice sets and preferences. We first characterize the sharp identification region of the model’s parameters by a finite set of conditional moment inequalities. We then apply our theoretical findings to learn about households’ risk preferences and choice sets from data on their deductible choices in auto collision insurance. We find that the data can be explained by expected utility theory with low levels of risk aversion and heterogeneous non-singleton choice sets, and that more than three in four households require limited choice sets to explain their deductible choices. We also provide simulation evidence on the computational tractability of our method in applications with larger feasible sets or higher-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity.

We extend Ellsberg's two-urn paradox and propose three symmetric forms of partial ambiguity by limiting the possible compositions in a deck of 100 red and black cards in three ways. Interval ambiguity involves a symmetric range of 50 - to 50 + n red cards. Complementarity, disjoint ambiguity arises from two nonintersecting intervals of 0 to and 100 - n to 100 red cards. Two-point ambiguity involves n or 100 - n red cards. We investigate experimentally attitudes towards partial ambiguity and the corresponding compound lotteries in which the possible compositions are drawn with equal objective probabilities. This yields three key findings: distinct attitudes towards the three forms of partial ambiguity, significant association across attitudes towards partial ambiguity and compound risk, and source preference between two-point ambiguity and two-point compound risk. Our findings help discriminate among models of ambiguity in the literature.

We present evidence that intrinsic demand for information about the future is increasing in expected future consumption utility. In the first experiment, subjects may resolve a lottery now or later. The information is useless for decision making, but the larger the reward, the more likely subjects are to pay to resolve the lottery early. In the second experiment, subjects may pay to avoid being tested for herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and the more highly feared type 2 (HSV-2). Subjects are three times more likely to avoid testing for HSV-2, suggesting that more aversive outcomes lead to more information avoidance. In a third experiment, subjects make choices about when to get tested for a fictional disease. Some subjects behave in a way consistent with expected utility theory, and others exhibit greater delay of information for more severe diseases. We also find that information choice is correlated with positive affect, ambiguity aversion, and time preference, as some theories predict. Data, as supplemental material, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2550 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics .

This paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in China. I conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of Chinese farmers, who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified Bt cotton a decade ago. In my analysis, I expand the measurement of risk preferences beyond expected utility theory to incorporate prospect theory. I find that farmers who are more risk averse or more loss averse adopt Bt cotton later. Farmers who overweight small probabilities adopt Bt cotton earlier.

This paper develops a revealed preference theory for the equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre-scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium. We provide a characterization theorem for the set of intertemporal preferences that generates a nonnegative announcement premium. Our theory establishes that the announcement premium identifies a significant deviation from time-separable expected utility and provides asset-market-based evidence for a large class of non-expected utility models. We also provide conditions under which asset prices may rise prior to some macroeconomic announcements and exhibit a pre-announcement drift.

In this article we argue that puzzle of tax compliance can be explained, at least in part, by recognizing the typically neglected role of ethics in individual behavior; that is, individuals do not always behave as the selfish, rational, self-interested individuals portrayed in the standard neoclassical paradigm, but rather are often motivated by many other factors that have as their main foundation some aspects of \"ethics.\" We argue that it is not possible to understand fully an individual's compliance decisions without considering in some form these ethical dimensions. Specifically, we argue here that there is much direct and indirect evidence that ethics differ across individuals and that these differences matter in significant ways for their compliance decisions. We then put this in the larger context of the inability of the standard neoclassical paradigm to explain compliance of at least some individuals, and we suggest several possible avenues by which theory can be expanded to incorporate ethics. We conclude by arguing that a full house of compliance strategies is needed to combat tax evasion, strategies that include the traditional \"enforcement\" paradigm suggested by and consistent with neoclassical theory, a less traditional \"service\" paradigm that recognizes the important role of a \"kinder and gentler\" tax administration in encouraging compliance, and, importantly, a new \"trust\" paradigm that is built on the foundation of ethics, in which the tax administration must recognize that it can erode the ethics of taxpayers by its own decisions.