The Relationship between Unemployment and Risk-Aversion In this paper we use a direct measure of individual risk-aversion to examine the relationship between risk-aversion and unemployment. The traditional search model predicts that more risk-averse individuals have lower reservation wages and thus are less likely to be observed in unemployment. Our findings, however, do not support this predic...

In this paper we analyze the equilibria structure of k-price auctions, k G 3, under the independent-private-value assumption. We discuss agents with an arbitrary attitude toward risk. That is, agents may be risk averse or risk seeking, or they may have an alternating attitude toward risk. We provide a characterization of a continuous symmetric equilibrium, prove that there exists at most one su...

2 Theoretical Insights 4 2.1 The VSL model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1.1 The standard model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1.2 The dead-anyway effect and the wealth effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.1.3 Risk aversion and background risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Various experimental procedures aimed at measuring individual risk aversion involve a list of pairs of alternative prospects. We first study the widely used method by Holt and Laury (2002), for which we find that the removal of some items from the lists yields a systematic decrease in risk aversion. This bias is quite distinct from other confounds that have been previously observed in the use o...

This paper aims to extend the results by Ross [15] and by Modica and Scarsini [13] to stochastic dominance of degree 4 and over. Specifically, it is shown that Ross’ approach can be extended to any order of risk attitude beyond the generalization proposed by Modica and Scarsini by means of sth degree increase in risk defined by Ekern [8].