A Prescriptive Model of Averse-Prone Risk Attitudes

This paper presents a prescriptive model for a decision maker's risk attitude toward financial outcomes that have important non-monetary effects, for example, effects on how the decision maker is judged by himself and by others. The model represents the risk attitude of a decision maker who is risk averse in the absence of such psychological effects, but who is risk prone in their presence for actions leading to net losses or the status quo. The model is examined for its adherence to normative principles. In particular, it is argued that the principle of dominance should be specified without any assumptions on preferences between conjunctions of lotteries; such assumptions are shown to imply the apparently stronger principle of risk neutrality

Utility Functions for Infinite-Period Planning

This paper presents a systematic discussion of decision analysis models for attitudes toward risk when the effects of a public policy choice extend into the distant or unbounded future. Several issues of social risk attitudes are identified and discussed. Conditions on preferences are presented by which value judgments concerning these issues can be included in a formal model for a public policy evaluation

Special Conditions on Risk Attitudes

This paper is concerned with a traditional problem in decision analysis, that of developing simple prescriptive models of preferences between lotteries. A general expected-utility &el is assumed throughout. First, the condition of risk neutrality is shown to belong to a family of conditions, each of which determines the decision maker's utility function. Second, the condition of a constant risk attitude is shown to belong to an analogous family of conditions, each of which determines the decision maker's utility function except for a single parameter. Assumptions of the utility function's differentiability, and often of its continuity, are not needed in these models. Two contrasting methods are discussed by which the models can be used in applications. Subject classification

Special Conditions on Tradeoffs

This paper discusses prescriptive models for an individual's or society's tradeoffs between different objectives. These objectives may refer to different attributes, different time-periods, or different individuals. Conditions on tradeoffs are shown to imply additive value functions that are sufficiently structured to be tractable in applications and are sufficiently general to represent preference issues concerning equity between the objectives and the dependence of tradeoffs on status quo positions

Quantum entanglement of charges in bound states with finite-size dyons

We show that the presence of finite-size monopoles can lead to a number of interesting physical processes involving quantum entanglement of charges. Taking as a model the classical solution of the N=2 SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, we study interaction between dyons and scalar particles in the adjoint and fundamental representation. We find that there are bound states of scalars and dyons, which, remarkably, are always an entangled configuration of the form |\psi > =|dyon+> |scalar-> +/- |dyon->|scalar+>. We determine the energy levels and the wave functions and also discuss their stability.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figures. Minor correction in references (to appear in JHEP04 (2002) 010