On the existence of certainty equivalents of various relevant types

Abstract

We tackle the problem of associating certainty equivalents with preferences over stochastic situations, which arises in a number of different fields (e.g., the theory of risk attitudes or the analysis of stochastic cooperative games). We study the possibility of endowing such preferences with certainty equivalence functionals that satisfy relevant requirements (such as positive homogeneity, translation invariance, monotonicity with respect to first-order stochastic dominance, and subadditivity). Uniqueness of the functional is also addressed in fairly general conditions.