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Reply: “Safety First – An Expected Utility Principle”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

Extract

We are grateful for the opportunity which Professors Gressis and Remaley's Comment [1] has afforded us to clarify our analysis of the relationship between Roy's Safety First principle and the Mean-Variance expected utility rule, which unfortunately they find misleading. In our original presentation we did not explicitly analyze situations in which Roy's criterion leads to an extreme corner solution; and G-R are perfectly correct in noting that if a riskless asset exists, a “Safety-Firster” will not invest in risky securities at all if the risk-free interest rate, r, exceeds the disaster level d. The reason for this is straightforward: such an investment strategy minimizes the risk of disaster. In fact in this particular instance the investor can reduce the probability of disaster to zero.

Type
Communications
Copyright
Copyright © School of Business Administration, University of Washington 1974

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References

REFERENCES

[1]Gressis, Norman, and Remaley, William A.. “Comment: ‘Safety First – An Expected Utility Principle.’Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, December 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[2]Levy, H., and Sarnat, M.. “Safety First – An Expected Utility Principle.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, June 1972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[3]Pyle, D. H., and Turnovsky, S. J.. “Safety-First and Expected Utility Maximization in Mean-Standard Deviation Portfolio Analysis.” Review of Economics and Statistics, February 1970.Google Scholar
[4]Roy, A.Safety First and the Holding of Assets.” Econometrica, July 1952.Google Scholar