While the concept of precautionary saving is well documented, that of precautionary effort has received relatively limited attention. In this note, we set up a two period model in order to analyze the conditions under which the introduction (or deterioration) of an independent background risk increases effort.

established almost stochastic dominance to reveal preferences for most rather than all decision makers with an increasing and concave utility function. In this paper, we first provide a counterexample to the main theorem of Leshno and Levy related to almost seconddegree stochastic dominance. We then redefine this dominance condition and show that the newly defined almost second-degree stochastic dominance is the necessary and sufficient condition to rank distributions for all decision makers excluding the pathological concave preferences. We further extend our results to almost higher-degree stochastic dominance.

Almost stochastic dominance allows small violations of stochastic dominance rules to avoid situations where most decision makers prefer one alternative to another but stochastic dominance cannot rank them. While the idea behind almost stochastic dominance is quite promising, it has not caught on in practice. Implementation issues and inconsistencies between integral conditions and their associated utility classes contribute to this situation. We develop generalized almost second-degree stochastic dominance and almost second-degree risk in terms of the appropriate utility classes and their corresponding integral conditions, and extend these concepts to higher degrees. We address implementation issues and show that generalized almost stochastic dominance inherits the appealing properties of stochastic dominance. Finally, we define convex generalized almost stochastic dominance to deal with risk-prone preferences. Generalized almost stochastic dominance could be useful in decision analysis, empirical research (e.g., in finance), and theoretical analyses of applied situations.

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