Gains from Diversification: A Majorization and Stochastic Dominance Approach

Abstract

By incorporating both majorization theory and stochastic dominance theory, this paper presents a general theory and a unifying framework for determining the diversification preferences of risk-averse investors and conditions under which they would unanimously judge a particular asset to be superior. In particular, we develop a theory for comparing the preferences of different convex combinations of assets that characterize a portfolio to give higher expected utility by second-order stochastic dominance. Our findings also provide additional methodology for determining the second-order stochastic dominance efficient set.