A Loss Aversion Performance Measure

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative method of evaluating the performance of active fund managers, by introducing to the field of performance measurement the more appealing loss aversion utility theory. We combine the latter to an already established performance measure developed by Grinblatt and Titman (1989), to construct a new and improved method of performance evaluation and then apply it for two distinct risk preference scenarios. The new methodology is used to evaluate the performance of a sample of UK pension funds over a 10-year period using the Knight, Satchell and Tran (1995) family of distributions for the excess returns. The results vary depending on the assumption of risk preferences: the results obtained in the first scenario are controversial, whereas for the second scenario, the new measure does seem to pick up on the timing skills exhibited by active fund managers and then reward them accordingly.