Lecture

Expected Utility and Risk-Aversion: Theoretical Foundations

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In course

FIN-609: Asset Pricing (2011 - 2024)

This course provides an overview of the theory of asset pricing and portfolio choice theory following historical developments in the field and putting emphasis on theoretical models that help our understanding of financial decision making and financial mar ...

Description

This lecture covers the theoretical foundations of expected utility and risk-aversion, including the Von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem, Allais Paradox, and insurance premium calculations with negative exponential utility. It also explores the concepts of second-order stochastic dominance and optimal portfolio choice in asset pricing.

Instructor

Semyon Malamud

Teaching & PhD PhD Students Johannes Schwab, Onur Demiray, Giuseppe Matera Past EPFL PhD Students Rémy Praz, Evgeny Petrov, Yuan Zhang, Julien Arsène Blatt, Erik Hapnes, Teng Andrea Xu, Boris Kuznetsov Courses Big Data and Machine Learning for Financial Economics FIN-622 This class is an introduction to Machine Learning and High Dimensional Statistics in Finance. We start with purely empirical approach, focusing first on high dimensional regressions then moving to kernel methods and deep l

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Economics

Microeconomics: Financial economics

Related concepts (32)

Risk aversion

In economics and finance, risk aversion is the tendency of people to prefer outcomes with low uncertainty to those outcomes with high uncertainty, even if the average outcome of the latter is equal to or higher in monetary value than the more certain outcome. Risk aversion explains the inclination to agree to a situation with a more predictable, but possibly lower payoff, rather than another situation with a highly unpredictable, but possibly higher payoff.

Hyperbolic absolute risk aversion

In finance, economics, and decision theory, hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) refers to a type of risk aversion that is particularly convenient to model mathematically and to obtain empirical predictions from. It refers specifically to a property of von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions, which are typically functions of final wealth (or some related variable), and which describe a decision-maker's degree of satisfaction with the outcome for wealth. The final outcome for wealth is affected both by random variables and by decisions.

Expected utility hypothesis

The expected utility hypothesis is a popular concept in economics that serves as a reference guide for decision making when the payoff is uncertain. The theory describes which options rational individuals should choose in a situation with uncertainty, based on their risk aversion. The expected utility hypothesis states an agent chooses between risky prospects by comparing expected utility values (i.e. the weighted sum of adding the respective utility values of payoffs multiplied by their probabilities).

Asset pricing

In financial economics, asset pricing refers to a formal treatment and development of two main pricing principles, outlined below, together with the resultant models. There have been many models developed for different situations, but correspondingly, these stem from either general equilibrium asset pricing or rational asset pricing, the latter corresponding to risk neutral pricing.

Exponential utility

In economics and finance, exponential utility is a specific form of the utility function, used in some contexts because of its convenience when risk (sometimes referred to as uncertainty) is present, in which case expected utility is maximized. Formally, exponential utility is given by: is a variable that the economic decision-maker prefers more of, such as consumption, and is a constant that represents the degree of risk preference ( for risk aversion, for risk-neutrality, or for risk-seeking).

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