A Behavioral Analysis of Stochastic Reference Dependence

We examine the reference-dependent risk preferences of Kőszegi and Rabin (2007), focusing on their choice-acclimating personal equilibria. Although their model has only a trivial intersection (expected utility) with other reference-dependent models, it has very strong connections with models that rely on different psychological intuitions. We prove that the intersection of rank-dependent utility and quadratic utility, two well-known generalizations of expected utility, is exactly monotone linear gain-loss choice-acclimating personal equilibria. We use these relationships to identify parameters of the model, discuss loss and risk aversion, and demonstrate new applications. (JEL D11, D81)