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Putting Risk in Its Proper Place

American Economic Review 2006 96(1), 280-289
This paper examines preferences toward particular classes of lottery pairs. We show how such concepts as prudence and temperance can be fully characterized by a preference relation over these lotteries. If preferences are defined in an expectedutility framework with differentiable utility, the direction of preference for a particular class of lottery pairs is equivalent to signing the n th derivative of the utility function. What makes our characterization appealing is its simplicity, which seems particularly amenable to experimentation.

Even (Mixed) Risk Lovers are Prudent

American Economic Review 2013 103(4), 1529-1535
The purpose of this note is to analyze properties of the risk lovers' utility function beyond the positive sign of its second order derivative. We show that—contrarily to a priori beliefs—risk lovers are prudent and are willing to accumulate precautionary savings.