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Optimal allocations with distortion risk measures and mixed risk attitudes

Published: October 21, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.18236v1

By: Mario Ghossoub, Qinghua Ren, Ruodu Wang

Potential Business Impact:

Helps people share risks fairly based on their bravery.

Business Areas:
Collaborative Consumption Collaboration

We study Pareto-optimal risk sharing in economies with heterogeneous attitudes toward risk, where agents' preferences are modeled by distortion risk measures. Building on comonotonic and counter-monotonic improvement results, we show that agents with similar attitudes optimally share risks comonotonically (risk-averse) or counter-monotonically (risk-seeking). We show how the general $n$-agent problem can be reduced to a two-agent formulation between representative risk-averse and risk-seeking agents, characterized by the infimal convolution of their distortion risk measures. Within this two-agent framework, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of optimal allocations, and we identify when the infimal convolution yields an unbounded value. When existence fails, we analyze the problem under nonnegative allocation constraints, and we characterize optima explicitly, under piecewise-linear distortion functions and Bernoulli-type risks. Our findings suggest that the optimal allocation structure is governed by the relative strength of risk aversion versus risk seeking behavior, as intuition would suggest.

Country of Origin
🇨🇦 Canada

Page Count
39 pages

Category
Economics:
Theoretical Economics