Beyond Risk Aversion: Why, How and What's Next?

Risk attitudes other than risk aversion (e.g. prudence and temperance) are becoming important both in theoretical and empirical work. While the literature has mainly focused its attention on the intensity of such risk attitudes (e.g. the concepts of absolute prudence and absolute temperance), I consider here an alternative approach related to the direction of these attitudes (i.e. the sign of the successive derivatives of the utility function).