Small- and large-stakes risk aversion: Implications of concavity calibration for decision theory [An article from: Games and Economic Behavior]

This digital document is a journal article from Games and Economic Behavior, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
A growing literature reports the conclusions that: (a) expected utility theory does not provide a plausible theory of risk aversion for both small-stakes and large-stakes gambles; and (b) this decision theory should be replaced with an alternative theory characterized by loss aversion. This paper explains that the arguments in previous literature fail to support these conclusions. Either concavity calibration has no general implication for expected utility theory or it has problematic implications for all decision theories that involve concave transformations (utility or value functions) of positive money payoffs, which makes loss aversion irrelevant to the argument.