Higher-Order Risk Attitudes toward Correlation

Abstract

Higher-order risk attitudes other than risk aversion (e.g., prudence and temperance) play vital roles both in theoretical and empirical work. While the literature has mainly focused on how they entail a preference for combining “good” outcomes with “bad” outcomes, we consider here an alternative approach which relates higher-order risk attitudes to the sign of correlation. The theoretical result in this paper proposes new insights into economic and financial applications such as risk aversion in the presence of another risk, bivariate stochastic dominance and justifying the first-order approach to moral hazard principal-agent problems.

Keywords: higher-order risk attitudes, stochastic dominance dependence, correlation, covariance

JEL Classification: D81