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When a spot market monopolist has a position in a corresponding futures market, he has an incentive to deviate from the spot market optimum to make this position more profitable. Rational futures market makers take this into account when setting prices. We show that the monopolist, by randomizing his futures market position, can strategically exploit his market power at the expense of other futures market participants. Furthermore, traders without market power can manipulate futures prices by hiding their orders behind the monopolist's strategic trades. The moral hazard problem stemming from spot market power thus provides a venue for strategic trading and manipulation that parallels the adverse selection problem stemming from inside information. Klassifikation: D82, G13
Mutual insurance companies and stock insurance companies are different forms of organized risk sharing: policyholders and owners are two distinct groups in a stock insurer, while they are one and the same in a mutual. This distinction is relevant to raising capital, selling policies, and sharing risk in the presence of financial distress. Up-front capital is necessary for a stock insurer to offer insurance at a fair premium, but not for a mutual. In the presence of an ownermanager conflict, holding capital is costly. Free-rider and commitment problems limit the degree of capitalization that a stock insurer can obtain. The mutual form, by tying sales of policies to the provision of capital, can overcome these problems at the potential cost of less diversified owners. JEL Classification: G22, G32
We propose a new decision criterion under risk in which people extract both utility from anticipatory feelings ex ante and disutility from disappointment ex post. The decision maker chooses his degree of optimism, given that more optimism raises both the utility of ex ante feelings and the risk of disappointment ex post. We characterize the optimal beliefs and the preferences under risk generated by this mental process and apply this criterion to a simple portfolio choice/insurance problem. We show that these preferences are consistent with the preference reversal in the Allais’ paradoxes and predict that the decision maker takes on less risk compared to an expected utility maximizer. This speaks to the equity premium puzzle and to the preference for low deductibles in insurance contracts. Keywords: endogenous beliefs, anticipatory feeling, disappointment, optimism, decision under risk, portfolio allocation.