Stochastic Dominance Under Independent Noise

Stochastic dominance is a crucial tool for the analysis of choice under risk. It is typically analyzed as a property of two gambles that are taken in isolation. We study how additional independent sources of risk (e.g., uninsurable labor risk, house price risk) can affect the ordering of gambles. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, background risk can be strong enough to render lotteries that are ranked by their expectation ranked in terms of first-order stochastic dominance. We extend our results to second-order stochastic dominance and show how they lead to a novel and elementary axiomatization of mean-variance preferences.