On Bivariate Risk Premia

This note examines the conditions under which the bivariate risk premium for one risk may be negative even if both risks are positively correlated, using a mean variance setting. The link between the bivariate risk premium and the partial bivariate risk premia is also investigated.     

The Relation Between Probability and Evidence Judgment: An Extension of Support Theory

We propose a theory that relates perceived evidence to numerical probability judgment. The most successful prior account of this relation is Support Theory, advanced in Tversky and Koehler (1994). Support Theory, however, implies additive probability estimates for binary partitions. In contrast, superadditivity has been documented in Macchi, Osherson, and Krantz (1999), and both sub- and superadditivity appear in the experiments reported here. Nonadditivity suggests asymmetry in the processing of focal and nonfocal hypotheses, even within binary partitions. We extend Support Theory by revising its basic equation to allow such asymmetry, and compare the two equations' ability to predict numerical assessments of probability from scaled estimates of evidence for and against a given proposition. Both between- and within-subject experimental designs are employed for this purpose. We find that the revised equation is more accurate than the original Support Theory equation. The implications of asymmetric processing on qualitative assessments of chance are also briefly discussed.     

The Greater Complexity of Lived Race: An Extension of Harris and Sim*

Objectives. Harris and Sim (2002) recently demonstrated the complexity of lived race by exploring patterns of racial self‐identification. They raised important sociological questions about the role of context in racial self‐identification, but offered an incomplete picture of ethnic fluidity by excluding Hispanics from their analyses. We address this limitation with data on Hispanics from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Methods. Our social‐psychological approach, using compositional analysis, focuses on the lived experience of race and ethnicity as qualitatively similar conceptual categories. Results. Informed by the cognitive process of social categorization, we find that considerably more individuals show fluidity in racial and ethnic self‐identification across contexts than suggested by Harris and Sim. Conclusions. Harris and Sim's thesis is even more strongly supported by these findings than in their original analysis, and our findings reinforce their challenge to the assumed stability of racial and ethnic measurement in sociology. We conclude by proposing a change in the measurement of race/ethnicity in America.     

Risk aversion in bargaining: An experimental study

This paper reports the results of three experiments designed to test the predictions of the principal game-theoretic models of bargaining concerning the influence of risk aversion on bargaining outcomes. These models predict that risk aversion will be disadvantageous in bargaining except in situations in which potential agreements are lotteries with a positive probability of being worse than disagreement. The experimental results support the models' predictions. However, in the range of payoffs studied here, the effects due to risk aversion may be smaller than some of the focal point effects observed in previous experiments. Implications for further theoretical and experimental work are considered.     

Optimal Insurance With Divergent Beliefs About Insurer Total Default Risk

This paper extends the classic expected utility theory analysis of optimal insurance contracting to the case where the insurer has a positive probability of total default and the buyer and insurer have divergent beliefs about this probability. The optimal marginal indemnity above the deductible is smaller (greater) than one if the buyer's assessment of default risk is more pessimistic (optimistic) than the insurer's. As an application of the model, we consider the market for reinsurance against catastrophic property loss and propose an expected utility theory explanation for the increasing and concave marginal indemnity schedule observed in this market.     

Extension of social insurance coverage to informal economy workers in China: An administrative and institutional perspective

This article reviews administrative issues in the context of decentralized social protection in China. In particular, what are the main obstacles to expanding social insurance coverage for workers in the informal economy? Over the last two decades, China has achieved remarkable progress toward universal social protection when this target was set as a national policy priority. However, the social insurance enrolment of informal economy workers still lags significantly behind. This article reviews the application of the International Labour Organization’s definition of informality in the Chinese context and overviews existing pension and health insurances in China. This article discusses the impact of China’s inter‐governmental fiscal relations and decentralized social protection in the multilevel government system. The article highlights that under a system of decentralized managed social insurance many informal economy workers choose to opt out of the system because of low benefits and high compliance costs. This result in deficits in social insurance coverage amongst informal economy workers.     

公共品概念的扩展:软品与硬品的一种组合

传统的公共品定义难以对公共品的供给低效率问题给出有力的解释,从公共品概念扩展的角度,探索提高公共品供给效率的理论基础成为近期公共经济学有待研究的重要问题.文章从供求两方面和个人参与物品供给决策或公共选择的角度,对公共品的概念进行新的扩展,将公共品视为软品和硬品的一种组合,并使用图解法初步给出公共品最优供给的均衡及其条件.     

Probability Weighting in Choice under Risk: An Empirical Test

This paper reports a violation of rank-dependent utility with inverse S-shaped probability weighting for binary gambles. The paper starts with a violation of expected utility theory: one-stage gambles elicit systematically different utilities than theoretically equivalent two-stage gambles. This systematic disparity does not disappear, but becomes more pronounced after correction for inverse S-shaped probability weighting. The data are also inconsistent with configural weight theory and Machina's fanning out hypothesis. Possible explanations for the data are loss aversion and anchoring and insufficient adjustment.     

文化:意义的出场和敞开

文化即"人类意义化实践的观念凝结",其核心乃是价值体系,文化的变迁主要体现为价值体系的转换。而作为文化本体外显的符号,又可分为近价值符号和远价值符号。近价值符号必然随着价值体系的变更而改变,远价值符号则可保持相对独立。由于价值体系这一共性的存在,诸文化样态具有一般性和可通约性;而远价值符号的发散和多样,则是文化特殊性和民族性的真正所在。     

Stochastic Choice and Consistency in Decision Making Under Risk: An Experimental Study

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to uncover the stochastic structure of individual preferences over lotteries. Unlike previous experiments, which have presented subjects with pair-wise choices between lotteries, our design allowed subjects to choose between two lotteries or (virtually) any convex combination of the two lotteries. We interpret the mixtures of lotteries chosen by subjects as a measure of the stochastic structure of choice. We test between two alternative interpretations of stochastic choice: the random utility interpretation and the deterministic preferences interpretation. The main findings of the experiment are that the typical subject prefers mixtures of lotteries rather than the extremes of a linear lottery choice set. The distribution of choices does not change between a first and second asking of the same question. We argue that this provides support for the deterministic preferences interpretation over the random utility interpretation of stochastic choice. As a subsidiary result, we find a small proportion of subjects make choices that violate transitivity, but the level of intransitive choice falls significantly over time.     

Risk Assessment Using Psychological Profiling Techniques: An Evaluation of Possibilities

Correspondence to John Hopton, 64 Peveril Close, Whitefield, Manchester M45 6NR, UK. Summary In this paper the writer reviews the available literature onpsychological profiling, discusses the differences between thefacet approach to psychological profiling and other techniqueswhich have been labelled ‘psychological profiling’,and discusses the applications of the facet approach. This discussionis followed by a critical evaluation of the potential of thefacet approach as a means of assessing whether or not a personsuffering from mental distress should be regarded as a riskto herself/himself or to other people. Finally, there is a discussionof issues around anti-oppressive and and-discriminatory practice,and the writer concludes that, in the light of recent mentalhealth legislation and mental health policy decisions, the useof psychological profiling as a means of risk assessment couldreduce the number of mentally distressed persons subjected tointrusive surveillance and/or compulsorily admitted to secureaccommodation.     

启蒙:精神的延伸性

启蒙有广义与狭义之分,狭义的启蒙指兴盛于18世纪的欧洲启蒙运动,广义的启蒙最一般的特征是精神的延伸性.启蒙在不同时代和民族中不可能是一样的,昨天的启蒙与今天和明天的启蒙也不是一样的.启蒙的精髓是呼吁独立思考的勇气,启蒙的自由意味着突破精神的禁区.本文沿着这样的思路分析了三个世纪以来法国启蒙运动的不同倾向.     

古汉语词义引申的认知原型阐释

认知原型是词义引申过程中思维联想的认知参照点,是联想扩展的基础和依据。在古汉语词义引申过程中,存在着“概念”、“事件”和“事物”三种不同的认知参照点,即“概念原型”、“事件原型”和“事物原型”,在不同的认知原型导向下获得的多义范畴系统内部各成分之间有着不同的关系。     

浅析风险社会理论及其现实意义

理论天地 新世纪的世界真的很不太平,且不说持续不断的局部战争和政局动荡,仅就突发性事件而言,“9.11”恐怖袭击、SARS流行、美国东部大停电事件等等,就已经打破了许多人对未来世界的美好遐想。人们从日益增长的忐忑不安中越来越明显地感受到,当代世界存在着种种难以预测的“风险影像”。由此也引起了人们对西方学术界早先提出的“风险社会理论”的关注。     

Tension and Extension: Thoughts on Scottish Surnames and Medieval Popular Culture

The answer to the question “What's in a name?” is plenty, according to W.F.H. Nicolaisen in his essay on Scottish surnames and what they can tell us of medieval popular culture. Place names, for example, often provide information about prehistoric strata and come to be equivalent in significance to material items which provide archeological insight into cultures. Surnames, when tied to place names, can give us information on migrations, while other types of names reveal occupational histories. and patterns of kinship. The very act of naming has both communal and personal importance and can yield significant socio-cultural data.     

Rethinking Risk Attitude: Aspiration as Pure Risk

There exists no completely satisfactory theory of risk attitude in current normative decision theories. Existing notions confound attitudes to pure risk with unrelated psychological factors such as strength of preference for certain outcomes, and probability weighting. In addition traditional measures of risk attitude frequently cannot be applied to non-numerical consequences, and are not psychologically intuitive. I develop Pure Risk theory which resolves these problems – it is consistent with existing normative theories, and both internalises and generalises the intuitive notion of risk being related to the probability of not achieving one’s aspirations. Existing models which ignore pure risk attitudes may be misspecified, and effects hitherto modelled as loss aversion or utility curvature may be due instead to Pure Risk attitudes.     

Reconciling with partial truths: An assessment of the dilemmas posed by the reconciliation process in South Africa

This paper looks critically at the “truth” that was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa that was supposed to form the basis on which the country would establish national reconciliation. Using case materials from the TRC proceedings and quotations from various authors, I set out to argue that the majority of South Africans who were brutalized by the legacy of apartheid were expected to reconcile with “partial truths.” This partiality was reflected in the manner in which the perpetrators gave their versions of truth, the way women positioned themselves and were positioned within the truth‐telling process, and lastly in the margmalization of certain truths and other processes that served consciously or unconsciously to obscure truth recovery.     

房地产投资风险控制初探

房地产投资应以风险管理为基础,要对房地产投资风险控制进行界定,房地产投资风险控制具有三个具体措施--风险回避、风险预防和风险抑制及其特点和适用性,其在房地产开发实践中应有具体应用.     

An Axiomatization of Cumulative Prospect Theory for Decision Under Risk

Cumulative prospect theory was introduced by Tversky and Kahneman so as to combine the empirical realism of their original prospect theory with the theoretical advantages of Quiggin's rank-dependent utility. Preference axiomatizations were provided in several papers. All those axiomatizations, however, only consider decision under uncertainty. No axiomatization has been provided as yet for decision under risk, i.e., the case in which given probabilities are transformed. Providing the latter is the purpose of this note. The resulting axiomatization is considerably simpler than that for uncertainty.