Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Decisions under risk are often multidimensional, where the preferences of the decision maker depend on several attributes. For example, an individual might be concerned about both her level of wealth and the condition of her health. Many times the signs of successive cross derivatives of a utility function play an important role in these models. However, there has not been a simple and intuitive interpretation for the meaning of such derivatives. The purpose of this paper is to give such an interpretation. In particular, we provide an equivalence between the signs of these cross derivatives and individual preference within a particular class of simple lotteries. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL Code: D81.

This paper develops context-free interpretations for the relative and partial N th degree risk attitude measures and show that various conditions on theses measures are utility characterizations of the effects of scaling general stochastic changes in different settings. It is then shown that these characterizations can be applied to generalize comparative statics results in a number of important problems, including precautionary savings, optimal portfolio choice, and competitive firms under price uncertainty.

Precautionary saving, Background risk, Prudence, Correlated risks, Bivariate utility function, D11, D81,

No abstract

This chapter surveys the economic literature on prevention and precaution. Prevention refers as either a self-protection activity -i.e. a reduction in the probability of a loss -or a self-insurance activityi.e. a reduction of the loss -. Precaution is defined as a prudent and temporary activity when the risk is imperfectly known. We first present results on prevention, including the effect of risk preferences, wealth and background risks. Second, we discuss how the concept of precaution is strongly linked to the effect of arrival of information over time in sequential models as well as to situations in which there is ambiguity over probability distributions.