Efficiency in Pure-Exchange Economies With Risk-Averse Monetary Utilities

Abstract

We study Pareto efficiency in a pure-exchange economy where agents' preferences are represented by risk-averse monetary utilities. These coincide with law-invariant monetary utilities, and they can be shown to correspond to the class of monotone, (quasi-)concave, Schur concave, and translation-invariant utility functionals. This covers a large class of utility functionals, including a variety of law-invariant robust utilities. Given that Pareto optima exist and are comonotone, we provide a crisp characterization thereof in the case of law-invariant positively homogeneous monetary utilities. This characterization provides an easily implementable algorithm that fully determines the shape of Pareto-optimal (PO) allocations. In the special case of law-invariant comonotone-additive monetary utility functionals (concave Yaari-dual utilities), we provide a closed-form characterization of Pareto optima. As an application, we examine risk-sharing markets where all agents evaluate risk through law-invariant coherent risk measures, a widely popular class of risk measures. In a numerical illustration, we characterize PO risk-sharing for some special types of coherent risk measures.