In: Economics
Consider the following five lottery tickets: l1 = ($100, .5; $10, .5); l2 = ($110, .5; $10, .5);
l3 = ($55, 1); l4 = ($110, .5; $0, .5); l5 = ($100, .7; $10, .3).
(a) If you know that an individual is an expected utility maximizer (who likes money), but you do not know more about this person, what can you say about how this individual ranks the lotteries? (You should conclude that one/some comparison(s) are unclear, but one/some can be deduced.)
(b) Same when you know the individual is risk neutral.
(c) Same when you know the individual is risk averse. Hint: This one has one or more relatively obvious comparisons, and one less so.
(d) Same when the individual has utility function u (z) = zt for t equal to 0.1, 0.5 and 0.9. Just by these comparisons which of these three individuals would you say is intuitively most / least risk averse?