Proceedings | Finance area | Year 2014
 

Rank Dependent Utility and Risk Taking in Complete Markets

by Xue Dong He; Roy Kouwenberg; Xun Yu Zhou
  
  the 68th European Meeting of the Econometric Society in Toulouse, France 25-29 August 2014

Abstract

We analyze the portfolio choice problem of investors who maximize rank dependent utility in a single-period complete market. We propose a new notion of less risk taking: choosing optimal terminal wealth that pays o more in bad states and less in good states of the economy. We prove that investors with a less risk averse preference relation always choose more risky terminal wealth, while receiving a risk premium in return. Such general comparative static results do not hold for portfolio weights, which we demonstrate with a counter-example in a continuous-time market.

Keywords: rank-dependent utility, portfolio choice, complete markets