Incomplete Insurance and Non-Expected Utility

This paper shows that the estimation of non-expected utility (Kreps-Porteus preference) based on the representative agent model is less robust with respect to the departure from complete markets than is the expected utility for the following reasons. First, the precautionary saving caused by uninsured shocks may be evaluated incorrectly. Second, the portfolio held by individual household includes not only marketable assets, but also non-marketable assets (e.g. human capital) in the context of incomplete markets. Third, returns on marketable assets may not provide sufficient information for recovering relevant parameters. The estimated parameters available from the existing empirical research are consistent with the biasedness of parameters implied by this study.