Who should exert more effort? Risk aversion, downside risk aversion and optimal prevention

I provide new results on how risk preferences affect optimal prevention. I identify a comparative risk aversion and a comparative downside risk aversion effect and highlight those cases where both effects are aligned. Alignment depends on a probability threshold, which, in turn, only depends on the preferences of the benchmark agent. This allows to define an entire class of decision-makers who all share the same comparative static prediction relative to the reference agent. I relate my findings to different intensity measures of downside risk aversion and apply them to parametric preference changes and specific classes of utility functions.