How much do people accept negative returns?

Investment always has its risk; however, when the potential return is big enough, investors can ignore such risk and increase their investments. Investment is a great way to redistribute one's income and wealth across his lifetime; therefore, good investment helps people gain better and more secure future, could be seen as a way to reduce their future uncertainties and risk. Standing from this point, people should be much willing to make good investments, as it reduces people's future risk and uncertainties rather than increasing the risks. However, when the market uncertainty and risk increases over people's expectations and acceptable levels, their decisions of investments could be dropped off or paused. This is probably the reason that in some economies the private sector investment is declining. Often the factor of uncertainties dominates the factor of expected returns, as people are loss aversion. If the market is risky enough and the economy is also stuck in recession, people should be able to accept a negative but guaranteed return rate, as in this case they are no longer making investment decisions, they are actually insuring themselves against their future risks. However, when people are making their investment decisions, they could accept a negative return rate in real term, but fail to accept a negative rate in nominal term in general. This is because we have 10 year US government bonds and 10 year UK gilts, which are considered to be risk-free. This is the benchmark of the minimum accepted return rates in a 10 year period. Therefore, people may be able to accept a negative return rate within a shorter time period (shorter than 10 years); however, people expect their 10 year return rates are above or at least equal to the 10 year US government bond yields.