IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecofin/v58y2021ics1062940821001674.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is insurance normal or inferior? -A regret theoretical approach-

Author

Listed:
  • Fujii, Yoichiro
  • Okura, Mahito
  • Osaki, Yusuke

Abstract

This study considers how changes in wealth affect insurance demand when individuals suffer disutility from regret. Anticipated regret stems from a comparison between the ex-post maximum and actual wealth. We consider a situation wherein individuals maximize their expected utility incorporating anticipated regret. The wealth effect on insurance demand can be classified into the risk and the regret effects. These effects are determined by the properties of the utility function and the regret function. We show that insurance can be normal when individuals place weight on anticipated regret, even though the utility function exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion. This result indicates that regret theory is a possible explanation to the wealth effect puzzle, in which insurance is normal from empirical observation, but it should be inferior by theoretical prediction under expected utility theory.

Suggested Citation

  • Fujii, Yoichiro & Okura, Mahito & Osaki, Yusuke, 2021. "Is insurance normal or inferior? -A regret theoretical approach-," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:58:y:2021:i:c:s1062940821001674
    DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2021.101559
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940821001674
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.najef.2021.101559?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Danthine, Jean-Pierre & Donaldson, John B., 2014. "Intermediate Financial Theory," Elsevier Monographs, Elsevier, edition 3, number 9780123865496.
    2. Christian Gollier, 2020. "Aversion to risk of regret and preference for positively skewed risks," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(4), pages 913-941, November.
    3. J. David Cummins & Olivier Mahul, 2004. "The Demand for Insurance With an Upper Limit on Coverage," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 71(2), pages 253-264, June.
    4. Tversky, Amos & Kahneman, Daniel, 1992. "Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 297-323, October.
    5. Loomes, Graham & Sugden, Robert, 1982. "Regret Theory: An Alternative Theory of Rational Choice under Uncertainty," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(368), pages 805-824, December.
    6. Auerbach, Alan J. & Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 1991. "The adequacy of life insurance purchases," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 1(3), pages 215-241, June.
    7. Zeelenberg, Marcel & Pieters, Rik, 2004. "Consequences of regret aversion in real life: The case of the Dutch postcode lottery," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 93(2), pages 155-168, March.
    8. Erwann O. Michel‐Kerjan & Carolyn Kousky, 2010. "Come Rain or Shine: Evidence on Flood Insurance Purchases in Florida," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 77(2), pages 369-397, June.
    9. Beenstock, Michael & Dickinson, Gerry & Khajuria, Sajay, 1986. "The determination of life premiums: An international cross-section analysis 1970-1981," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 261-270, October.
    10. Okura Mahito & Kasuga Norihiro, 2007. "Financial Instability and Life Insurance Demand," Asia-Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance, De Gruyter, vol. 2(1), pages 1-14, May.
    11. Luigi Guiso & Tullio Jappelli, 1998. "Background Uncertainty and the Demand for Insurance Against Insurable Risks," The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association), vol. 23(1), pages 7-27, June.
    12. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    13. Rachel J. Huang & Alexander Muermann & Larry Y. Tzeng, 2016. "Hidden Regret In Insurance Markets," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 83(1), pages 181-216, January.
    14. Michael Braun & Alexander Muermann, 2004. "The Impact of Regret on the Demand for Insurance," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 71(4), pages 737-767, December.
    15. Loomes, Graham & Sugden, Robert, 1987. "Some implications of a more general form of regret theory," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 270-287, April.
    16. Han Bleichrodt & Alessandra Cillo & Enrico Diecidue, 2010. "A Quantitative Measurement of Regret Theory," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 56(1), pages 161-175, January.
    17. David E. Bell, 1982. "Regret in Decision Making under Uncertainty," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 30(5), pages 961-981, October.
    18. MOSSIN, Jan, 1968. "Aspects of rational insurance purchasing," LIDAM Reprints CORE 23, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    19. Georges Dionne (ed.), 2013. "Handbook of Insurance," Springer Books, Springer, edition 2, number 978-1-4614-0155-1, March.
    20. Fujii, Yoichiro & Okura, Mahito & Osaki, Yusuke, 2016. "Regret, rejoicing, and mixed insurance," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 126-132.
    21. J. David Cummins & Olivier Mahul, 2004. "The demand for insurance with an upper limit on coverage," Post-Print hal-01952122, HAL.
    22. J. François Outreville, 2013. "The Relationship Between Insurance and Economic Development: 85 Empirical Papers for a Review of the Literature," Risk Management and Insurance Review, American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 16(1), pages 71-122, March.
    23. Quiggin, John, 1994. "Regret Theory with General Choice Sets," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 8(2), pages 153-165, March.
    24. Todd Sarver, 2008. "Anticipating Regret: Why Fewer Options May Be Better," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 76(2), pages 263-305, March.
    25. Zeelenberg, M. & Pieters, R., 2004. "Consequences of regret aversion in real life : The case of the Dutch postcode lottery," Other publications TiSEM d16cb90a-f96c-4fce-b4c7-4, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    26. Jeeva Somasundaram & Enrico Diecidue, 2017. "Regret theory and risk attitudes," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 55(2), pages 147-175, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Armantier, Olivier & Foncel, Jérôme & Treich, Nicolas, 2023. "Insurance and portfolio decisions: Two sides of the same coin?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(3), pages 201-219.
    2. Hao Pan & Guo-liang Yang & Xiao-lei Chen & Yuan-yu Lou & Teng Wang & Zhong-cheng Guan, 2024. "Regret cross-efficiency evaluation using attitudinal entropy approach," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-17, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fujii, Yoichiro & Okura, Mahito & Osaki, Yusuke, 2016. "Regret, rejoicing, and mixed insurance," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 126-132.
    2. Christian Gollier, 2020. "Aversion to risk of regret and preference for positively skewed risks," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(4), pages 913-941, November.
    3. Korn, Olaf & Rieger, Marc Oliver, 2019. "Hedging with regret," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 192-205.
    4. Diecidue, Enrico & Somasundaram, Jeeva, 2017. "Regret theory: A new foundation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 172(C), pages 88-119.
    5. Chi, Yichun & Zhuang, Sheng Chao, 2022. "Regret-based optimal insurance design," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 22-41.
    6. Herweg, Fabian & Müller, Daniel, 2021. "A comparison of regret theory and salience theory for decisions under risk," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 193(C).
    7. Armantier, Olivier & Foncel, Jérôme & Treich, Nicolas, 2023. "Insurance and portfolio decisions: Two sides of the same coin?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(3), pages 201-219.
    8. Gollier, Christian, 2016. "Explaining rank-dependent utility with regret and rejoicing," IDEI Working Papers 863, Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse.
    9. Han Bleichrodt & Peter P. Wakker, 2015. "Regret Theory: A Bold Alternative to the Alternatives," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 0(583), pages 493-532, March.
    10. Martín Egozcue & Xu Guo & Wing-Keung Wong, 2015. "Optimal output for the regret-averse competitive firm under price uncertainty," Eurasian Economic Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 5(2), pages 279-295, December.
    11. Qin, Jie, 2015. "A model of regret, investor behavior, and market turbulence," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 150-174.
    12. Fang Liu, 2021. "Regret theory under fear of the unknown," Papers 2108.01825, arXiv.org.
    13. Enrico Diecidue & Haim Levy & Moshe Levy, 2020. "Probability Dominance," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(5), pages 1006-1020, December.
    14. Zheng, Jiakun, 2021. "Willingness to pay for reductions in health risks under anticipated regret," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    15. Jiakun Zheng, 2020. "Optimal insurance design under narrow framing," Post-Print hal-04227370, HAL.
    16. Zheng, Jiakun, 2020. "Optimal insurance design under narrow framing," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 180(C), pages 596-607.
    17. Emmanuelle GABILLON, 2020. "When choosing is painful: anticipated regret and psychological opportunity cost," Bordeaux Economics Working Papers 2020-04, Bordeaux School of Economics (BSE).
    18. Andrea C. Hupman & Jay Simon, 2023. "The Legacy of Peter Fishburn: Foundational Work and Lasting Impact," Decision Analysis, INFORMS, vol. 20(1), pages 1-15, March.
    19. Zhuzhu Zhou, 2024. "Ranking blame," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 78(2), pages 403-441, September.
    20. Jiakun Zheng, 2021. "Willingness to pay for reductions in health risks under anticipated regret," Post-Print hal-04227414, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Decreasing absolute risk aversion; Demand shift; Regret sensitivity; Wealth effect puzzle;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • G52 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Insurance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:58:y:2021:i:c:s1062940821001674. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620163 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.