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Showing posts from July, 2017

Risk aversion or loss aversion

Suppose you offer someone called Albert a gamble - if the toss of a coin comes up heads then you pay him £100 and if it comes up tails he pays you £100. The evidence suggests that most people will not take on that gamble. If Albert also turns down the gamble, what does that tell you about Albert's preferences?          One thing we can conclude is that Albert is risk averse. In particular, the gamble was fair because Albert's expected payoff was 0 and, by definition, if someone turns down a fair gamble then they are exhibiting risk aversion. It is hard to argue with a definition and so we can conclude that Albert is risk averse. The more interesting question is why he displays risk aversion?            The micro-economic textbook would tell us that it is because of diminishing marginal utility from money. A diagram helps explain the logic. Suppose that Albert has the utility function for money depicted below. In this specific case I have set the utility of £m as the square