Accounts of altered eating behavior in semantic dementia generally emphasize gluttony and abnormal food preferences. Here we describe two female patients with no past history of eating disorders who developed early prominent aversion to food in the context of an otherwise typical semantic dementia syndrome. One patient (aged 57) presented features in line with anorexia nervosa while the second ...

We study perfect information bilateral bargaining game with an infinite alternating-offers procedure, in which we add an assumption of history dependent preference. A player will devalue a share which gives her strictly lower discounted utility than what she was offered in earlier stages of the bargaining. Under the strong version of the assumption, we characterize the essentially unique subgam...

In this article three different types of loss aversion equilibria in bimatrix games are studied. Loss aversion equilibria are Nash equilibria of games where players are loss averse and where the reference points—points below which they consider payoffs to be losses— are endogenous to the equilibrium calculation. The first type is the fixed point loss aversion equilibrium, introduced in Shalev (...

Loss aversion, a well-documented behavioral phenomenon, characterizes decisions under risk in adult populations. As such, loss aversion may provide a reliable measure of risky behavior. Surprisingly, little is known about loss aversion in adolescents, a group who manifests risk-taking behavior, or in anxiety disorders, which are associated with risk-avoidance. Finally, loss aversion is expected...

The violations of expected utility axioms displayed in the Ellsberg paradox have recently been attributed to ambiguity aversion. In this paper, we study the impact of ambiguity aversion on equilibrium asset pricing and portfolio holdings in competitive financial markets. We pay particular attention to potential heterogeneity, because a significant minority usually does not violate expected util...

There is growing evidence that tonic activity of the opioid system may be important in the modulation of affective state. Naloxone produces a conditioned place aversion in rodents, an effect that is centrally mediated. Previous pharmacological data using antagonists with preferential actions at mu-, delta-, and kappa-opioid receptors indicate the importance of the mu-opioid receptor in mediatin...

Exploring the Nature of Loss Aversion Loss aversion, the fact that losses have a greater impact than gains, is a fundamental property of behavioral accounts of choice. In this paper, we suggest four possible characterizations of the relative impact of losses and gains: (1) It could be a constant, such as the much cited value of 2, as in losses have twice the impact of gains. (2) It could be a s...

Traditionally, downside risk aversion is the study of the placement of a pure risk (a secondary risk) on either the upside or the downside of a primary two-state risk. When the decision maker prefers to have the secondary risk placed on the upside rather than the downside of the primary lottery, he is said to display downside risk aversion. The literature on the intensity of downside risk avers...

We develop a tractable method to estimate multiple prior models of decision-making under ambiguity. In a representative sample of the U.S. population, we measure ambiguity attitudes in the gain and loss domains. We find that ambiguity aversion is common for uncertain events of moderate to high likelihood involving gains, but ambiguity seeking prevails for low likelihoods and for losses. We show...

Classically, risk aversion is equated with concavity of the utility function. In this paper we explore the conceptual foundations of this definition. In accordance with neo-classical economics, we seek a scale-free definition of risk aversion, based on the decisions maker’s preference order alone, independent of numerical values. We explore two such definitions. We then show that when cast in q...