Pessimism, Optimism and Credit Rationing

Jean-Louis Arcand

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: In their celebrated contribution on credit rationing, Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) showed that the expected return to the borrower on a loan is increasing in the risk of the project it funds. In this paper, I show that their results do not necessarily carry over to the case where the agents' preferences can be described by rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU). In particular, a pessimistic probability distortion function for borrowers can yield sufficient concavity in returns for the latter to be decreasing in risk, thus eliminating adverse selection. Whether credit rationing can obtain or not is then shown to depend upon the interaction between borrower pessimism and lender optimism.

Keywords: Keywords: rank-dependent expected utility; credit rationing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cta and nep-upt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00562645
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00562645/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Pessimism, Optimism and Credit Rationing (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00562645

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().