Conference Agenda

Session
Track TH1-6: Asset Pricing
Time:
Thursday, 22/May/2025:
2:45pm - 3:30pm

Session Chair: Toomas Laarits, NYU Stern School of Business
Discussant: Marianne Andries, University of Southern California
Location: Babbio Center Auditorium


Presentations

An Arrow-Pratt Theory of Preference for Early Resolution of Uncertainty

Hengjie Ai1, Ravi Bansal2, Hongye Guo3, Amir Yaron4

1University of Wisconsin, Madison; 2Duke University; 3University of Hong Kong; 4Bank of Israel and Wharton

This paper develops a theory of the elasticity of preference for early resolution of uncertainty (PER) that parallels the Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion in expected utility theory. We demonstrate that the local welfare gain of early resolution of uncertainty is equal to the product of the elasticity of PER and the conditional variance of continuation utility. We illustrate how asset market data can be used to estimate the elasticity of PER and how this measure can be used to compute the welfare gain for various experiments of early resolution of uncertainty.

Ai-An Arrow-Pratt Theory of Preference for Early Resolution-413.pdf