# Does risk aversion cause diminishing marginal utility, or vice versa?

by lugita15
Tags: aversion, diminishing, marginal, risk, utility, versa, vice
 Mentor P: 9,588 Is it really appropriate to call this risk aversion? It is risk aversion in terms of your bank account numbers, but not in terms of your utility*. A concave money->utility function is very natural: if you have no money at all, life is hard. If you have some money, you gain a lot - like a bed and a proper food supply. If you have 1000 times that money, the bed can be more comfortable, but that is not worth 1000 times the simple bed. *actually, humans don't follow the required rationality axioms. There is another type of risk aversion: risk aversion within the utility function. Let's assume you have a well-defined, known utility function, so we can express all bets in terms of their utility. You start with an account of "1" utility-unit and you can use this to participate in bets (negative values are not allowed). I will offer you two bets in series: (A) Give away 1 unit of utility, gain 11 with 10% probability and 0 with 90% probability. afterwards: (B) Give away 1 unit of utility, gain 100 with 90% probability and 0 with 10% probability. With that knowledge, you will reject (A) even if it has a positive expectation value - the risk that you lose, and cannot participate in B any more, is too large. Now consider a modified setup: I don't tell you what (B) will be. Do you accept (A)? If you expect a better bet for (B) (where you need some probability distribution for bets I could offer), it is good to be risk-averse, and reject (A).
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P: 13,603
 Quote by lugita15 My question is, which direction does the causation run?
And my answer is "yes." Or maybe "no."

You have a bit of a map-territory inversion going on here. The map is not the territory (Alfred Korzybski). By asking which is cause, which is effect, you are confusing the map for the territory. The concepts of a utility function and risk aversion are parts of the same map. Cause and effect -- that's asking about the territory.

Note also that this map is not perfect. People are not rational. The same people who buy lottery tickets are also unwilling to invest their hard-earned money in a place where it might grow. The same people who drop tens of thousands of dollars for a frivolous night on the town irrationally pinch pennies elsewhere.

P: 1,574

## Does risk aversion cause diminishing marginal utility, or vice versa?

 Quote by mfb Is it really appropriate to call this risk aversion? It is risk aversion in terms of your bank account numbers, but not in terms of your utility*.
Well, I'm just using standard terminology here. What you call "risk aversion in terms of your bank account numbers" is what people usually just refer to as risk aversion. Of course, risk aversion can be perfectly rational behavior, because as you said, it doesn't mean that you value a gamble at less than the expected value of the utility, it just means that you value a gamble at less than the expected value of the monetary payout.
 A concave money->utility function is very natural: if you have no money at all, life is hard. If you have some money, you gain a lot - like a bed and a proper food supply. If you have 1000 times that money, the bed can be more comfortable, but that is not worth 1000 times the simple bed.
Well, you're interpreting the utility function as representing intensity of preference. But couldn't you just as well view the utility function as a summary of your tolerance for risk?
 *actually, humans don't follow the required rationality axioms.
Well, for the purpose of the question, I'm assuming the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms.
 Let's assume you have a well-defined, known utility function, so we can express all bets in terms of their utility. You start with an account of "1" utility-unit and you can use this to participate in bets (negative values are not allowed). I will offer you two bets in series: (A) Give away 1 unit of utility, gain 11 with 10% probability and 0 with 90% probability. afterwards: (B) Give away 1 unit of utility, gain 100 with 90% probability and 0 with 10% probability.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Allais paradox. But again, I'm not trying to assess whether humans actually obey these axioms. (That ship has probably sailed by now; there is a whole field called behavioral economics, after all.)
P: 1,574
 Quote by D H The concepts of a utility function and risk aversion are parts of the same map. Cause and effect -- that's asking about the territory.
Certainly utility functions are a human construct. But here are two things that are presumably not human constructs: attitudes concerning risk, and relative intensity of preferences. Questions of the form "Do you value A to B more than you value C to D?", and questions of the form "Do you value pA + qB to rC + sD?" (where p, q, r, and s are probabilities and A, B, C, and D are outcomes) seem to be questions about the territory, not about the map. Moreover, they seem to be questions concerning different parts of the territory. Yet we have a theorem that somehow says that (assuming certain rationality axioms), a person's answers to questions of the first type completely determine their answers to questions of the second type, and vice versa. This seems to suggest that the answers to one of these sets of questions is more fundamental than the answers to the other set of questions.

The fundamental issue is this: do people have intensities of preference that determine their attitude toward risk? Or do people have attitudes toward risk that makes it appear as if they have certain intensities of preference?

 Note also that this map is not perfect. People are not rational.
Point taken. I was just trying to explore the implications of the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, not defend them.
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P: 9,588
 Quote by lugita15 Well, you're interpreting the utility function as representing intensity of preference. But couldn't you just as well view the utility function as a summary of your tolerance for risk?
How can you define "risk" without a utility function?
There is no universal axiom "money is good to have", and there is no prior reason to assume that utility is linear with anything. I can keep track of the logarithm of my money, or an exponential function. Why should a utility function be proportional to some specific way to keep track of money?

The Allais paradox is something different - and I think psychological effects shouldn't be neglected there (if you pick 1B, you will really hate that decision in 1% of the cases).
P: 1,574
 Quote by mfb How can you define "risk" without a utility function?
Certainly you can't really talk about attitudes towards risk without talking about preferences and ordinal utility. But do you really need a cardinal utility function in order to talk about attitudes toward risk?
 Quote by mfb There is no universal axiom "money is good to have", and there is no prior reason to assume that utility is linear with anything.
I agree with that. When did I assume either of those things?
 Quote by mfb Why should a utility function be proportional to some specific way to keep track of money?
When did I say that it should?
 Quote by mfb The Allais paradox is something different
Your numbers seemed pretty similar to the Allais paradox, and the way a lot of people deal with the Allais paradox is by rejecting the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, in favor of axioms that accommodate the notion you called "risk in the utility function". But that's irrelevant to this thread.
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P: 9,588
 Quote by lugita15 Certainly you can't really talk about attitudes towards risk without talking about preferences and ordinal utility. But do you really need a cardinal utility function in order to talk about attitudes toward risk?
I don't see how you can define "risk" at all, without at least an implicit notion of utility.
If you consider the risk to lose something as negative, you already attached a utility to the object you might lose.

 I agree with that. When did I assume either of those things? When did I say that it should?
If utility is an arbitrary function of money, it is pointless to talk about risks. You have no way to say what a risk is.
 P: 1,574 Here is another way to phrase my question: if you consider preferences over outcomes, you can only define a utility function that's unique up to a monotonous transformation. But if you also consider preferences over lotteries, then you can define a utility function that's unique up to affine transformation, i.e. if two functions u and v represent the same set of preferences over lotteries, then v = a + bu for some constants a and b. What is the reason for that? Is it because your preferences over lotteries reveal more information about your preferences over outcomes, specifically the relative intensities of those preferences? Or is nothing at all being revealed about intensity of preference, with the new information just being about your preferences concerning lotteries?
P: 1,574
 Quote by mfb I don't see how you can define "risk" at all, without at least an implicit notion of utility. If you consider the risk to lose something as negative, you already attached a utility to the object you might lose.
This may just be a matter of semantics. You're making a statement about your preference ordering (i.e. that you prefer to have something than to lose it), but that doesn't mean you need to invoke a cardinal utility function. But yes, you are making a statement about utility, just ordinal utility.
 Quote by mfb If utility is an arbitrary function of money, it is pointless to talk about risks. You have no way to say what a risk is.
Risk is uncertainty concerning what outcome will occur. When I said "attitudes toward risk", all I meant is "attitudes toward uncertain outcomes".
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P: 9,588
 Quote by lugita15 Here is another way to phrase my question: if you consider preferences over outcomes, you can only define a utility function that's unique up to a monotonous transformation. But if you also consider preferences over lotteries, then you can define a utility function that's unique up to affine transformation, i.e. if two functions u and v represent the same set of preferences over lotteries, then v = a + bu for some constants a and b. What is the reason for that?
Consider three outcomes a,b,c, where you like a less than b and b less than c.

Define the utility of a to be some arbitrary value A and the utility of c to be some arbitrary value C with C>A.

Now consider a bet: you can either get b with 100% probability, or c with a probability of p and a with a probability of 1-p. Choose p in such a way that you are indifferent between both options. This allows to assign b the utility B=pC+(1-p)A.

You can do the same for every set of 3 possible outcomes to fix the utility values of every outcome, and the only freedom is the initial choice of the utilities for two outcomes (here: A and C).

Right. Lotteries allow to compare three outcomes quantitatively.
P: 1,574
 Quote by mfb Consider three outcomes a,b,c, where you like a less than b and b less than c. Define the utility of a to be some arbitrary value A and the utility of c to be some arbitrary value C with C>A. Now consider a bet: you can either get b with 100% probability, or c with a probability of p and a with a probability of 1-p. Choose p in such a way that you are indifferent between both options. This allows to assign b the utility B=pC+(1-p)A.
Yes, that's how von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions are constructed, but the question is, how do you know that the value that this procedure assigns to b really represents how much you like b compared to how much you like a and c? In other words, how do you know that (C-B)/(B-A) represents the extent to which you value c to b compared to the extent to which you value a to b? Couldn't it be that that number instead reflects your feelings concerning uncertain outcomes vs. certain outcomes, and tells you nothing about the actual relative intensities of your preferences concerning a, b, and c?

For instance, suppose that a was "getting 0 dollars", b was "getting 5 dollars", and c was "getting 10 dollars". And suppose that you're indifferent between getting 5 dollars on the one hand, and having a 75% of getting 10 dollars and a 25% chance of getting 0 dollars on the other hand. Then B would equal .25A + .75C. One way to interpret that is to say that going from 5 dollars to 10 dollars matters one third as much to you than going from 0 dollars to 5 dollars. But couldn't the explanation instead be that you value the 5 dollars more because it's a "sure thing", and you prefer certain outcomes to uncertain outcomes?

 Right. Lotteries allow to compare three outcomes quantitatively.
But do the values produced by the lotteries just have to do with your feelings about the three outcomes, or could they be telling you something about another set of preferences you have, one dealing with uncertainty?
 Mentor P: 13,603 Now you are asking better questions. You are essentially asking whether expected utility theory has any utility at all. Economists have found multiple issues with expected utility theory. Some, most notably Matthew Rabin, have gone so far as to say that it has no utility whatsoever. Expected utility is not just pining for the fjords. It is, in Rabin's words, an ex-hypothesis. Rabin, Matthew. "Risk aversion and expected‐utility theory: A calibration theorem." Econometrica 68, no. 5 (2000): 1281-1292. A better view is that the expected utility hypothesis is a simplification of reality. Physicists and engineers do this all the time. Ohm's law. Newton's laws of motion. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. The problem with Rabin's criticism is that the magic does work sometimes. There does exist some economic space where the hypothesis is valid. The problem with rejecting his criticism is that the magic oftentimes doesn't work. The space where the theory is valid is bounded. It is not universally true.
P: 1,574
 Quote by D H Now you are asking better questions.
I've been trying to ask the same fundamental question all along: assuming that the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms are correct, do the relative intensity of your preferences determine your preferences concerning uncertainty, or do your preferences over lotteries arise seperately than your preferences over certain (i.e sure) outcomes? (I phrase the question a bit more mathematically in my post #9, in terms of the set of transformations that the utility function is unique up to.)
 Quote by D H You are essentially asking whether expected utility theory has any utility at all.
No, I'm not. I'm taking for granted the assumption that people maximize the expected value of their von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function. So my question isn't whether people maximize expected utility, but WHY they maximize it (assuming they do). I think there's basically two possible answers to my question:

1. Assuming the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms are right, the shape of the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function reflects the relative intensities of your preferences over certain (i.e. sure) outcomes, and that determines your preferences concerning uncertain outcomes, via the expected value of the utility function.

2. Assuming the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms are right, the shape of the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function tells you absolutely nothing about the relative intensities of your preferences. Instead, it summarizes your preferences concerning uncertain outcomes. That is why preferences concerning uncertain outcomes can be so easily gleamed from calculating the expected value of the utility function.

 Quote by D H Economists have found multiple issues with expected utility theory. Some, most notably Matthew Rabin, have gone so far as to say that it has no utility whatsoever. Expected utility is not just pining for the fjords. It is, in Rabin's words, an ex-hypothesis. Rabin, Matthew. "Risk aversion and expected‐utility theory: A calibration theorem." Econometrica 68, no. 5 (2000): 1281-1292.
That paper is about types of risk aversion that (he claims) cannot be modeled in expected utility theory, specifically "loss aversion". But my goal is more modest: I'm trying to understand the source of the kind of risk aversion that IS compatible with expected utility theory.

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