SYMPOSIUM ON CHOICES UNDER UNCERTAINTY: BEYOND RISK AVERSION

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jori.12248
• Author: Christian Gollier,Louis Eeckhoudt
• Date: 01 June 2018
• Published date: 01 June 2018

SYMPOSIUM ON CHOICES UNDER UNCERTAINTY:BEYOND

RISK AVERSION

INTRODUCTION

Harris Schlesinger played a prominent role in the development of insurance

economics and expected utility theory over the last four decades. During this period,

he deeply influenced many colleagues with whom he interacted. Working with

Harris Schlesinger was indeed an efficient way of combining ...good with good!

Indeed, Harris was at the same time a brilliant researcher and a very friendly

colleague. Before presenting the contributions in this Symposium, let us first illustrate

these two aspects of Harris’ personality.

The importance of Harris’ contributions to our field (let’s say “the economics of risk”)

can best be appreciated by having a look at his list of publications from 1986 to 2015.

1

Two features of this list are immediately obvious. First, Harris published in a very

regular manner with many different co-authors. This fact is a consequence of Harris’

high technical and conceptual abilities combined with an impressive quality of

writing. The second feature of the list is related to the set of journals in which the

articles appeared. Unsurprisingly, Harris was a regular contributor to the journals

dealing with the economics of risk such as Geneva Risk and Insurance Review,Journal of

Risk and Insurance,Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Insurance: Mathematics and

Economics. Notably, his articles also appeared on a quite regular basis in the top

journals. Let us mention them because such a list is rather exceptional: Quarterly

Journal of Economics (1990), Journal of Finance (1990), Journal of Political Economy (1983),

Economics Journal (1997), American Economic Review (2006), Management Science (1995,

2006, 2007), Review of Economic Studies (2010), Econometrica (1996, 2014), and Journal of

Economic Theory (1991, 2009, 2011).

Quite interestingly, this set of publications is rather evenly spread on the whole range

of Harris’ career. It started in 1983 with the “Doherty–Schlesinger” article dealing

with the effect of (possibly correlated!) background risk on risk taking

2

and it ended

with the “Deck–Schlesinger” contribution to experimental economics, a field that was

quite new for Harris and in which he invested with much success near the end of his

1

See ideas.repec.org, the section «Articles»for Harris Schlesinger.

2

This article was to a large extent the beginning of an abundant literature on these topics.

©2018 The Journal of Risk and Insurance. Vol. 85, No. 2, 309–312 (2018).

DOI: 10.1111/jori.12248

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