IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ems/eureri/204.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Risk Seeking Drive Asset Prices? A stochastic dominance analysis of aggregate investor preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Post, G.T.
  • Levy, H.

Abstract

We investigate whether risk seeking or non-concave utility functions can help to explain the cross-sectional pattern of stock returns. For this purpose, we analyze the stochastic dominance efficiency classification of the value-weighted market portfolio relative to benchmark portfolios based on market capitalization, book-to-market equity ratio and momentum. We use various existing and novel stochastic dominance criteria that account for the possibility that investors exhibit local risk seeking behavior. Our results suggest that Markowitz type utility functions, with risk aversion for losses and risk seeking for gains, can capture the cross-sectional pattern of stock returns. The low average yield on big caps, growth stocks and past losers may reflect investors' twin desire for downside protection in bear markets and upside potential in bull markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Post, G.T. & Levy, H., 2002. "Does Risk Seeking Drive Asset Prices? A stochastic dominance analysis of aggregate investor preferences," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2002-50-F&A, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    • Handle: RePEc:ems:eureri:204
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repub.eur.nl/pub/204/erimrs20020529135403.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1992. "The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 47(2), pages 427-465, June.
    2. Bansal, Ravi & Viswanathan, S, 1993. "No Arbitrage and Arbitrage Pricing: A New Approach," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(4), pages 1231-1262, September.
    3. John Lintner, 1965. "Security Prices, Risk, And Maximal Gains From Diversification," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 20(4), pages 587-615, December.
    4. Sharpe, William F, 1991. "Capital Asset Prices with and without Negative Holdings," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(2), pages 489-509, June.
    5. Shlomo Benartzi & Richard H. Thaler, 1995. "Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(1), pages 73-92.
    6. 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..
    7. Haim Levy, 1992. "Stochastic Dominance and Expected Utility: Survey and Analysis," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 38(4), pages 555-593, April.
    8. repec:bla:jfinan:v:53:y:1998:i:2:p:549-573 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. 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.
    10. William F. Sharpe, 1964. "Capital Asset Prices: A Theory Of Market Equilibrium Under Conditions Of Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 19(3), pages 425-442, September.
    11. Berk, Jonathan B., 1997. "Necessary Conditions for the CAPM," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 245-257, March.
    12. Chapman, David A, 1997. "Approximating the Asset Pricing Kernel," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(4), pages 1383-1410, September.
    13. Moshe Levy & Haim Levy, 2013. "Prospect Theory: Much Ado About Nothing?," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 7, pages 129-144, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    14. Harry Markowitz, 1952. "The Utility of Wealth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 60(2), pages 151-151.
    15. Bawa, Vijay S. & Lindenberg, Eric B., 1977. "Capital market equilibrium in a mean-lower partial moment framework," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 189-200, November.
    16. Rubinstein, Mark, 1974. "An aggregation theorem for securities markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 1(3), pages 225-244, September.
    17. Carhart, Mark M, 1997. "On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 57-82, March.
    18. Levy, Moshe & Levy, Haim, 2001. "Testing for risk aversion: a stochastic dominance approach," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 71(2), pages 233-240, May.
    19. Milton Friedman & L. J. Savage, 1948. "The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 56(4), pages 279-279.
    20. Fama, Eugene F & MacBeth, James D, 1973. "Risk, Return, and Equilibrium: Empirical Tests," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 607-636, May-June.
    21. Levy, Haim, 1969. "A Utility Function Depending on the First Three Moments: Comment," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 24(4), pages 715-719, September.
    22. Shefrin, Hersh & Statman, Meir, 2000. "Behavioral Portfolio Theory," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 35(2), pages 127-151, June.
    23. Levy, Haim & Wiener, Zvi, 1998. "Stochastic Dominance and Prospect Dominance with Subjective Weighting Functions," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 16(2), pages 147-163, May-June.
    24. Nicholas Barberis & Ming Huang & Tano Santos, 2001. "Prospect Theory and Asset Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(1), pages 1-53.
    25. Tobias J. Moskowitz & Mark Grinblatt, 1999. "Do Industries Explain Momentum?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1249-1290, August.
    26. Campbell R. Harvey & Akhtar Siddique, 2000. "Conditional Skewness in Asset Pricing Tests," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(3), pages 1263-1295, June.
    27. Friend, Irwin & Westerfield, Randolph, 1980. "Co-Skewness and Capital Asset Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 35(4), pages 897-913, September.
    28. Chris Starmer, 2000. "Developments in Non-expected Utility Theory: The Hunt for a Descriptive Theory of Choice under Risk," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 38(2), pages 332-382, June.
    29. Wang, Zhenyu, 1998. "Efficiency loss and constraints on portfolio holdings," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(3), pages 359-375, June.
    30. Jegadeesh, Narasimhan & Titman, Sheridan, 1993. "Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(1), pages 65-91, March.
    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. W. Wong & R. Chan, 2008. "Prospect and Markowitz stochastic dominance," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 4(1), pages 105-129, January.

    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. Thierry Post & Haim Levy, 2002. "Does Risk Seeking drive Asset Prices?," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 02-070/2, Tinbergen Institute.
    2. Fang, Yi, 2012. "Aggregate investor preferences and beliefs in stock market: A stochastic dominance analysis," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 528-547.
    3. Arvanitis, Stelios & Scaillet, Olivier & Topaloglou, Nikolas, 2020. "Spanning analysis of stock market anomalies under prospect stochastic dominance," Working Papers unige:134101, University of Geneva, Geneva School of Economics and Management.
    4. Chabi-Yo, Fousseni & Ruenzi, Stefan & Weigert, Florian, 2018. "Crash Sensitivity and the Cross Section of Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 53(3), pages 1059-1100, June.
    5. Post, Thierry & van Vliet, Pim, 2006. "Downside risk and asset pricing," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 823-849, March.
    6. Post, G.T., 2003. "Asset prices and omitted moments; A stochastic dominance analysis of market efficiency," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2003-017-F&A, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    7. Haim Levy & Enrico G. De Giorgi & Thorsten Hens, 2012. "Two Paradigms and Nobel Prizes in Economics: a Contradiction or Coexistence?," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 18(2), pages 163-182, March.
    8. Levy, Haim & Wiener, Zvi, 2013. "Prospect theory and utility theory: Temporary versus permanent attitude toward risk," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 1-23.
    9. Jakusch, Sven Thorsten & Meyer, Steffen & Hackethal, Andreas, 2019. "Taming models of prospect theory in the wild? Estimation of Vlcek and Hens (2011)," SAFE Working Paper Series 146, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, revised 2019.
    10. W. Wong & R. Chan, 2008. "Prospect and Markowitz stochastic dominance," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 4(1), pages 105-129, January.
    11. Botshekan, Mahmoud & Kraeussl, Roman & Lucas, Andre, 2012. "Cash Flow and Discount Rate Risk in Up and Down Markets: What Is Actually Priced?," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 47(6), pages 1279-1301, December.
    12. Levy, Haim & Levy, Moshe, 2002. "Experimental test of the prospect theory value function: A stochastic dominance approach," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 89(2), pages 1058-1081, November.
    13. Rocciolo, Francesco & Gheno, Andrea & Brooks, Chris, 2022. "Explaining abnormal returns in stock markets: An alpha-neutral version of the CAPM," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    14. Haim Levy, 2010. "The CAPM is Alive and Well: A Review and Synthesis," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 16(1), pages 43-71, January.
    15. Ephraim Clark & Zhuo Qiao & Wing-Keung Wong, 2016. "Theories Of Risk: Testing Investor Behavior On The Taiwan Stock And Stock Index Futures Markets," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 54(2), pages 907-924, April.
    16. Sean A. Anthonisz & Tālis J. Putniņš, 2017. "Asset Pricing with Downside Liquidity Risks," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(8), pages 2549-2572, August.
    17. Committee, Nobel Prize, 2013. "Understanding Asset Prices," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2013-1, Nobel Prize Committee.
    18. Montone, Maurizio, 2023. "Beta, value, and growth: Do dichotomous risk-preferences explain stock returns?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 39(C).
    19. Atilgan, Yigit & Bali, Turan G. & Demirtas, K. Ozgur & Gunaydin, A. Doruk, 2020. "Left-tail momentum: Underreaction to bad news, costly arbitrage and equity returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 135(3), pages 725-753.
    20. Ji Cao & Marc Oliver Rieger & Lei Zhao, 2019. "Safety First, Loss Probability, and the Cross Section of Expected Stock Returns," Working Paper Series 2019-02, University of Trier, Research Group Quantitative Finance and Risk Analysis.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    asset pricing; prospect theory; risk seeking; specification error; stochastic dominance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
    • M - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics

    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:ems:eureri:204. 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: RePub (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/erimanl.html .

    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.