Decreasing relative risk premium

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Frank Hansen
We consider the risk premium demanded by a decision maker in order to be indifferent between obtaining a new level of wealth with certainty, or to participate in a lottery which either results in unchanged wealth or an even higher level than what can be obtained with certainty. We study preferences such that the corresponding relative risk premium is a decreasing function of present wealth, and we determine the set of associated utility functions. We find a new characterization of risk vulnerability and determine a large set of utility functions, closed under summation and composition, which are both risk vulnerable and have decreasing relative risk premium. We finally introduce the notion of partial risk neutral preferences on binary lotteries and show that partial risk neutrality is equivalent to preferences with decreasing relative risk premium
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Theoretical Economics
Volume7
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)Art. 37
Number of pages29
ISSN1935-1704
Publication statusPublished - 2007

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - expected utility theory, relative risk premium, risk vulnerability, preferences on lotteries, partial risk neutrality

ID: 1408703