â â â â  reza roshan [1] â  department of economics, university of sistan and baluchestan , iran â  mosayeb pahlavani â  department of economics, university of sistan and baluchestan, iran â  mohammad nabi shahyaki tash â  department of economics, university of sistan and baluchestan, iran â  â â â  abstract â  consumption is the principal feature of iran’s gross national production. therefor...

A risk-averse price-setting firm which knows the quantity demanded at the status quo price but has imperfect information otherwise may choose not to change it although an otherwise identical risk-neutral firm would do so, provided the variance of the firm's subjective probability distribution over quantities demanded as a function of price displays a kink at the status quo. This is equivalent t...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to enter a lottery. We relate this measure to consumers’ endowment and attributes and to measures of background risk. We ...nd that risk aversion is a decreasing function of endowment thus rejecting CARA preferences but that the elasticity to consumption i...

Risk aversion is one of the most basic assumptions of economic behavior, but few studies have addressed the question of where risk preferences come from and why they differ from one individual to the next. Here, we propose an evolutionary explanation for the origin of risk aversion. In the context of a simple binary-choice model, we show that risk aversion emerges by natural selection if reprod...

In this article, we show how the degree of risk aversion, discounting, and preference for intertemporal substitution for a natural resource manager can be structurally estimated within a recursive utility framework. We focus on the management of a reservoir in California, and test the data for consistency with a recursive utility model specification versus standard time-additive separability. T...

This paper considers the macroeconomic implications of a set of empirical studies finding a high degree of dispersion in preference heterogeneity. It develops a model with both uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk and risk aversion heterogeneity to quantify their effects on wealth inequality. The results show that with the available estimates of the risk aversion distribution from PSID data th...

It is widely believed among economists and businessmen that increases in risk or in risk aversion should increase the value of information for decisionmakers. For instance, one suspects that risk-averse farmers should be willing to pay more for improved weather forecasts than risk-neutral ones. Similarly “defensive medicine’’ (i.e., the excess ordering of almost useless diagnostic tests) is oft...

A two period bargaining model with asymmetric information is considered. An uninformed seller charges a uniform price to two buyers. A risk averse seller offers a larger price cut in period two when one buyer remains in the market than when two buyers remain. The price in period one is sensitive to the number of buyers and the seller’s degree of risk aversion. The initial price charged to a sin...

This paper investigates the degree of risk aversion exhibited by Irish fund managers. Assuming a mean-variance optimising manager, we employ the dynamic conditional correlation specification (Engle, 2002) of the multivariate GARCH model to estimate the coefficient of relative risk aversion. We find that fund managers whose remit is to “aggressively” manage their portfolios have coefficients lyi...

We consider agents who have a dynamic preference for flexibility, as in Krishna and Sadowski [2012] (KS). Such agents are uncertain about their future utilities. We first consider a version of the Lucas tree economy, where the representative agent behaves as in KS and is uncertain about his degree of future risk aversion. We show that in such an economy, the representative agent’s uncertainty a...