AbstractMotivated by recent advances on elicitability of risk measures and practical considerations of risk optimization, we introduce the notions of Bayes pairs and Bayes risk measures. Bayes risk measures are the counterpart of elicitable risk measures, extensively studied in the recent literature. The Expected Shortfall (ES) is the most important coherent risk measure in both industry practice and academic research in finance, insurance, risk management, and engineering. One of our central results is that under a continuity condition, ES is the only class of coherent Bayes risk measures. We further show that entropic risk measures are the only risk measures which are both elicitable and Bayes. Several other theoretical properties and open questions on Bayes risk measures are discussed.