Follow Up On Measuring Utility

Jonathan came back with this:

Hi, thanks for that Professor. IMO Utility does describe the feeling, or at least the “something” that kicks-in mentally, particularly with ""money"" based decisions - when you know (or don’t) you are detaching yourself from the wholly rational course of action (expected return) to take the money on the table offered, or a sum offered with certainty that is just enough of a push - for you to cash in your chips.
Where I’m stuck – is that there is a load of books and research about the abstract pro’s and cons – but I can’t find anything anywhere on the net that explains just how to go about discovering how to assess yourself (e.g. a clear example from the grass up).
Any ideas?
Thanks again,
Jon   

My response:

If you took the standard expected utility theory at face value, then you would approximate the utility function locally with a quadratic.  The benefit of doing that is you get that for small gambles around the mean, the theory says the risk premium should be the Arrow-Pratt measure of absolute risk aversion at the mean, r, times the variance of the gamble.

For example suppose you face the gamble of $1,001 with probability .5 and  $999 with probability .5, so the mean is $1,000 and the variance of this gamble is $1, which is small relative to the mean.  You then try to elicit what amount of money for certain would make the person indifferent between having that or having the gamble.   Suppose you find the certainty equivalent determined experimentally is $999.60.  So in this case the risk premium is $.40 and hence the inferred Arrow-Pratt measure of absolute risk aversion is .4.

Now if you do this seriously, you would like to see whether the theory is really confirmed.  So you might try other small gambles with mean $1000.  For example you might consider the gamble (a) of $1001 with probability .8 and $996 with probability .2  as well as the gamble (b) of  $1004 with probability .2 and $999 with probability .8.  Each of these gambles has the same variance, $4.  So ahead of time you might guess based on what you discovered before that the measured risk premium would be $1.60, which must be the case if  the formula in the first paragraph held exactly and you measured the risk premium perfectly in the previous experiment.  You might get something close to that for the gamble (a) but you definitely won't for gamble (b) because that says the certainty equivalent is $998.40, which is lower than the $999, what is attained in the lower income state.

There are two possible source of error here: (1) measurement of the risk premium in the first experiment and (2) the formula that relates risk premium to the Arrow-Pratt measure and the variance of the gamble.   The second error becomes less as the variance gets smaller but the first error gets bigger that way.  So even if you take the theory as fully correct, you will have issues in measuring the utility function.

Let me make one more point on this.  The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in  Economics, has shown that the standard expected utility theory is wrong and that something else called Prospect Theory is closer to how we actually behave.  In that a reference point matters for evaluating gambles and then whether the outcome is a win with respect to the reference point (where the individual is then risk averse) or a loss with respect to the reference point (where the individual is then risk seeking).  Put another way, the utility function for Prospect Theory is convex-concave, with an inflection point at the reference point.   If you find this interesting you might read Kahneman's recent book, Thinking Fast and Slow.