A Theory of Insurance and Gambling

Nyman's A Theory of Insurance and Gambling builds on his groundbreaking analysis of the demand for and welfare effects of health insurance, extending it to insurance in general and to unidentified parallels between the demand for insurance and the demand for gambling. In each area he provides a compelling critique of conventional theories, grounded in empirical evidence, while offering alternative models and insights that align with both intuition and evidence. This is an important book for anyone interested in insurance and gambling.

Auteur
John A. Nyman is Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. His over 150 research articles include important analyses of topics as diverse as: the effect of excess demand on the quality of nursing home care, the need for consistency in cost-effectiveness analyses, the effectiveness of health promotion programs in the workplace, the impact of attrition bias in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, and alternative explanations for the St. Petersburg paradox and the gambler's fallacy. In addition to these, he is the author of a number of research articles on insurance and gambling, and the book, The Theory of Demand for Health Insurance (Stanford University Press, 2003).

Texte du rabat

In 1948, Milton Friedman and L. J. Savage suggested that risk preferences explain the demand for insurance and gambling--a theory that is still almost universally accepted by economists today. In A Theory of Insurance and Gambling, John A. Nyman critiques this approach and proposes a new theory of the motivations for insurance and gambling. Nyman seeks to reorient how economists think about insurance and gambling by moving away from uncertainty as a negative motivating factor to simply a mechanical feature that allows for the augmentation of income and consumption, by moving away from biased models that ignore income effects and state dependency in evaluating the benefits from insurance and gambling, and by moving away from preferences regarding risk toward the desire to obtain additional future income.