Under expected utility, prudence is equivalent to a positive third derivative of utility and plays a crucial role in precautionary saving behaviour. Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006) proposed behavioural de nitions of prudence and of higher order risk preferences. The present paper proposes a similar de nition for prudence with respect to ambiguity, i.e., situations in which objective probabilit...

We study the prevalence of the higher order risk attitudes of prudence and temperance, in a large demographically representative sample, as well as in a sample of undergraduate students. Participants make pairwise choices between lotteries of the form proposed by Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006). The choices in these lotteries isolate prudent from imprudent, and temperate from intemperate, beha...

This paper re-examines the link between absolute prudence and self-protection activities. We show that the level of effort chosen by an agent with positive and decreasing absolute prudence is larger than the optimal effort chosen by a risk-neutral agent if the degree of absolute prudence is less than a threshold that is utilityindependent and empirically verifiable. We explain this threshold by...

— In this paper we study the optimal saving problem in the framework of possibility theory. The notion of possibilistic precautionary saving is introduced as a measure of the way the presence of possibilistic risk (represented by a fuzzy number) influences a consumer in establishing the level of optimal saving. The notion of prudence of an agent in the face of possibilistic risk is defined and ...

In this paper we deal with the basic two-period consumption saving problem where the first and second period consumption utility, respectively v and u is assumed to be concave as usually. Considering the usual assumption of identity of u and v, we show that prudence is fully characterized by the convexity of u′ in the EU model. More interesting we prove that for the RDEU model, prudence is full...

Cressy (2000) argues that the positive correlation between assets and the rate of business startups is due to DARA preferences. We show however that the required property is prudence, and prudence is consistent with DARA, IARA or CARA. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We study how to perform tests on samples of pairs observations and predictions in order assess whether or not the are prudent. Prudence requires that mean difference observation-prediction can be shown significantly negative. For safe conclusions, we suggest testing both unweighted (or equally weighted) weighted means explicitly taking into account randomness individual pairs. The test methods ...