Preferences over Meyer’s Location-Scale Family,” Economic Theory (forthcoming

This paper extends Meyer’s (1987) location-scale family with general n random seed sources. Firstly, we clarify and generalize existing results to this multivariate setting. Some useful geometrical and topological properties of the location-scale expected utility functions are obtained. Secondly, we introduce and study some general non-expected utility functions defined over the location-scale (LS) family. Special care is made in characterizing the shape of the indifference curves induced by the LS expected utility functions and non-expected utility functions. Finally, efforts are also made to study several well-defined partial orders and dominance relations defined over the LS family. These include the first-, second- order stochastic dominance, the mean-variance rule, and a newly defined location-scale dominance. © 2005 Wing-Keung Wong and Chenghu Ma. This research is initiated during Ma’s visit to th