Risk Aversion and Consumer Choice With Many Commodities

The Arrow-Pratt analysis of risk aversion offers a cogent explanation of how changes in attitudes towards risk affect the choices of expected utility maximizing agents whose preferences are defined over a single variable, wealth. The restriction of the analysis to utility functions of one argument, however, severely limits its applicability: in many problems of choice we must represent the agent's preferences with a multivariate, not univariate, utility function. The main purpose of this thesis is to extend the Arrow-Pratt analysis to choice problems with more than two commodities and with multiple sources of risk.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Schlee, Edward Eugene

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mirman, Leonard,

• Economics, Theory

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8823243

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/70800