The alleged privacy paradox states that individuals report high values for personal privacy, while at the same time they report behavior that contradicts a high privacy value. This is a misconception. Reported privacy behaviors are explained by asymmetric subjective beliefs. Beliefs may or may not be uncertain, and non-neutral attitudes towards uncertainty are not necessary to explain behavior. This research was conducted in three related parts. Part one presents an experiment in individual decision making under uncertainty. Ellsberg's canonical two-color choice problem was used to estimate attitudes towards uncertainty. Subjects believed bets on the color ball drawn from Ellsberg's ambiguous urn were equally likely to pay. Estimated attitudes towards uncertainty were insignificant. Subjective expected utility explained subjects' choices better than uncertainty aversion and the uncertain priors model. A second treatment tested Vernon Smith's conjecture that preferences in Ellsberg's problem would be unchanged when the ambiguous lottery is replaced by a compound objective lottery. The use of an objective compound lottery to induce uncertainty did not affect subjects' choices. The second part of this dissertation extended the concept of uncertainty to commodities where quality and accuracy of a quality report were potentially ambiguous. The uncertain priors model is naturally extended to allow for potentially different attitudes towards these two sources of uncertainty, quality and accuracy. As they relate to privacy, quality and accuracy of a quality report are seen as metaphors for online security and consumer trust in e-commerce, respectively. The results of parametric structural tests were mixed. Subjects made choices consistent with neutral attitudes towards uncertainty in both the quality and accuracy domains. However, allowing for uncertainty aversion in the quality domain and not the accuracy domain outperformed the alternative which only allowed for uncertainty aversion in the accuracy domain. Finally, part three integrated a public-goods game and punishment opportunities with the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism to elicit privacy values, replicating previously reported privacy behaviors. The procedures developed elicited punishment (consequence) beliefs and information confidentiality beliefs in the context of individual privacy decisions. Three contributions are made to the literature. First, by using cash rewards as a mechanism to map actions to consequences, the study eliminated hypothetical bias as a confounding behavioral factor which is pervasive in the privacy literature. Econometric results support the 'privacy paradox' at levels greater than 10 percent. Second, the roles of asymmetric beliefs and attitudes towards uncertainty were identified using parametric structural likelihood methods. Subjects were, in general, uncertainty neutral and believed 'bad' events were more likely to occur when their private information was not confidential. A third contribution is a partial test to determine which uncertain process, loss of privacy or the resolution of consequences, is of primary importance to individual decision-makers. Choices were consistent with uncertainty neutral preferences in both the privacy and consequences domains.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This essay argues that personal greenhouse gas emissions render the individual responsible forclimate-related harm to a great extent. To accomplish this, there will primarily be a focus onanswering the most important criticisms of individual climate responsibility. Issues concerningcausality are the first to be brought up, followed by issues concerning direct harm, simpledivision and unintentional contributions to harm, among other topics. The three main conclusionsdrawn in the discussion of these topics are that individual emissions can be considered partialcauses of climate harm, that most emission-heavy activity is immoral to some extent, and that theact of contributing to collective actions with foreseeable negative effects is morally questionable.These conclusions and their implications will be interpreted in a way that is compatible with thedefinition of responsibility that is used. Responsibility is considered to be a matter of degree forthe purposes of this essay. This will allow for a much wider range of relevant aspects to be takeninto consideration, when arguing for individual responsibility for climate harm

Within Central Counterparty Clearing, the Clearing House collects Initial Margin from its Clearing Members. The Initial Margin can be calculated in many ways, one of which is by applying the commonly used risk measure Value-at-Risk. However, Value-at-Risk has one major flaw, namely its inability to encapsulate Tail Risk. Due to this, there has for long been a desire to replace Value-at-Risk with Expected Shortfall, another risk measure that has shown to be much better suited to encapsulate Tail Risk. That said, Value-at-Risk is still used over Expected Shortfall, something which is mainly due to the fact that there is no consensus regarding how one should backtest Expected Shortfall. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate some of the most commonly proposed methods for backtesting Expected Shortfall. In doing this, several non-parametric backtests of Expected Shortfall are investigated using simulated data as well as market data from different types of securities. Moreover, this thesis aims to shed some light on the differences between Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall, highlighting why a change of risk measure is not as straightforward as one might believe. From the investigations of the thesis, several backtests are found to be sufficient for backtesting the Initial Margin with Expected Shortfall as the risk measure, the so called Minimally Biased Relative backtest showing the overall best performance of the looked at backtests. Further, the thesis visualizes how Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall are two risk measures that are inherently different in a real-world setting, emphasizing how one should be careful making conversions between the two based upon parametric assumptions.

Neste trabalho são definidos, discutidos e estimados o Valor em Risco e o Expected Shortfall. Estas são medidas de Risco Financeiro de Mercado muito utilizadas por empresas e investidores para o gerenciamento do risco, aos quais podem estar expostos. O objetivo foi apresentar e utilizar vários métodos e modelos para a estimação dessas medidas e estabelecer qual o modelo mais adequado dentro de determinados cenários. / In this work Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall are defined, discussed and estimated . These are measures heavily used in Financial Market Risk, in particular by companies and investors to manage risk, which they may be exposed. The aim is to present and use several methods and models for estimating those measures and to establish which model is most appropriate in certain scenarios.