What attitudes to risk underlie distortion risk measure choices?

Understanding the attitude to risk implicit within a risk measure sheds some light on the way in which decision makers perceive losses. In this paper, a two-stage strategy is developed to characterize the underlying risk attitude involved in a risk evaluation, when executed by the family of distortion risk measures. First, we show that aggregation indicators defined for discrete Choquet integrals provide information about the implicit global risk attitude of the agent. Second, an analysis of the distortion function offers a local description of the agent’s stance on risk in relation to the occurrence of accumulated losses. Here, the concepts of absolute risk attitude and local risk attitude arise naturally. An example is provided to illustrate the usefulness of this strategy for characterizing risk attitudes in an insurance company. ∗Department of Econometrics, Riskcenter-IREA, University of Barcelona, Av. Diagonal, 690, 08034 Barcelona, Spain.