...The book that I chose for this book review is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology. The main thesis of the book is quite simple. When judging the world around us, we use two mental systems: Fast and Slow. The Fast system (System 1) is mostly unconscious and makes snap judgments based on our past experiences and emotions. When we use this system we are as likely to be wrong as we are to be right. The Slow system (System 2) is more rational, conscious and slow. They work together to provide us with a view of the world around us. Together, they shape our impressions of the world around us and help us make choices. System 1 is largely unconscious and it makes snap judgments based upon our memory of similar events and our emotions. System 2 is painfully slow, and is the process by which we consciously check the facts and think carefully and rationally. Problem is, System 2 is easily distracted and hard to engage, and System 1 is wrong as often as it is right. System 1 is easily swayed by our emotions. Some examples he cites include the fact that pro golfers are more accurate when putting for par than they are for birdie, regardless of distance, and people buy more cans of soup when there's a sign on the display that says "Limit 12 per customer." An easier way...
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...Behavioural Finance Martin Sewell University of Cambridge February 2007 (revised April 2010) Abstract An introduction to behavioural finance, including a review of the major works and a summary of important heuristics. 1 Introduction Behavioural finance is the study of the influence of psychology on the behaviour of financial practitioners and the subsequent effect on markets. Behavioural finance is of interest because it helps explain why and how markets might be inefficient. For more information on behavioural finance, see Sewell (2001). 2 History Back in 1896, Gustave le Bon wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, one of the greatest and most influential books of social psychology ever written (le Bon 1896). Selden (1912) wrote Psychology of the Stock Market. He based the book ‘upon the belief that the movements of prices on the exchanges are dependent to a very considerable degree on the mental attitude of the investing and trading public’. In 1956 the US psychologist Leon Festinger introduced a new concept in social psychology: the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, Riecken and Schachter 1956). When two simultaneously held cognitions are inconsistent, this will produce a state of cognitive dissonance. Because the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, the person will strive to reduce it by changing their beliefs. Pratt (1964) considers utility functions, risk aversion and also risks considered as a proportion of total assets...
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...Can We Measure Portfolio Performance? by Steen Koekebakker and Valeri Zakamouline Introduction The risky assets available to investors are numerous: mutual funds, hedge funds, structured products, equity-linked notes to name a few. The characteristics of each asset class can be summarized in the different return distributions. Even within a single asset class the return distributions of assets are not alike. We assume that the return distributions of all risky assets are known and would like to choose the best asset to invest to, meaning that the risky assets are mutually exclusive investment alternatives. How to do this? The standard approach in financial theory and practice is to employ some portfolio performance measure to rank the various risky investments. Each portfolio performance measure calculates a score for each asset using its probability distribution of returns. The best asset to invest to is the asset with the highest score. The Sharpe ratio is a commonly used measure of portfolio performance. But because it is based on mean-variance theory, this measure can only be used in some restrictive cases, for example, when return distributions are normal. When return distributions are non-normal, the Sharpe ration can lead to misleading conclusions and unsatisfactory paradoxes, see Bernardo and Ledoit (2000) and Hodges (1998). There have been proposed numerous universal performance measures that, in one way or the other, are alternatives to the Sharpe...
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...MANASA KARUSALA DIVYA YEDAMA 1) What was your strategy in the classroom market? What did you think each of the assets was worth? Were you able to implement your strategy? Why or why not? Why (or why wasn't) your strategy successful? My strategy was to equalize both the red and blue assets, as it is impossible to predict before hand which asset would have more value. But I couldn’t implement my strategy, as it is not easy to maintain that equivalence especially when the entire market is active with too many active participants. Though I did not implement my strategy, as I was unable to compete in the active market and couldn’t buy or sell the assets, I am among the people with highest amount. This is because I had 5 red assets initially and the value of red asset was way too high than blue asset. If I had implemented the strategy I would have had lesser money, as the value of blue asset is very less than the red ones and ones with more red assets would benefit more. Frankly I didn’t have any estimate of what each asset would value at. The probability for each number is equal and hence prediction is difficult. Then in game 2 most of the people might have had the thought of increasing the red assets but I thought the value might drop and blue might weigh more. With this view I did not sell any of the blue assets I had. As a result my instinct was true and I was again among the players with most money. So irrespective of the strategy I was successful in the 2 games...
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...Chapter 9 Behavioral Finance and Technical Analysis The effiecient market hypothesis makes two important predictions. First, it implies that security prices properly reflect whatever information is available to investors. Second, active traders will find it difficult to outperform passive strategies such as holding market indexes. A relatively new school of thought dubbed behavioral finance argues that sprawling literature on trading strategies has missed a larger and more important point by overlooking the first implication of efficient markets-the correctness of security prices. Behavioral finance are models that emphasize potential implications of psychological factors affecting investor behavior. Its premise is that conventional financial theory ignores how real people make decisions and that people make a difference. A growing number of economists have come to interpret the anomalies literature as consistent with several “irrationalities” that seem to characterize individuals making complicated decisions. 2 Broad Categories: 1. Investors do not always process information correctly and therefore infer incorrect probability distributions about furture rates of return. 2. Even given a probability distribution of returns, they often make inconsistent or systematically suboptimal decisions. Information Processing Errors in information processing can lead investors to misestimate the true probabilities of possible events or associated rates of return. Forecasting errors...
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...Do Professional Traders Exhibit Loss Realization Aversion? Peter R. Locke * The George Washington University Steven C. Mann ** Texas Christian University November 2000 * Finance Department, School of Business and Public Management, The George Washington University, Washington DC, 20052. plocke@gwu.edu, (202) 994-3669. ** M.J. Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University. Fort Worth, Texas 76129 S.mann@tcu.edu ; (817) 257-7569. We wish to thank Peter Alonzi, Chris Barry, Rob Battalio, Gerald P. Dwyer, Avner Kalay, Paul Laux, Paula Tkac, Steve Manaster, Arthur Warga, and seminar participants at the 1998 FMA meetings, the 1999 Chicago Board of Trade Spring Research seminar, the 1999 Western Finance meetings, the 1999 Southern Finance meetings, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, TCU, University of Texas at Dallas, and the First Annual Texas Finance Festival for discussions and comments helpful to the evolution of the paper. Pattarake Sarajoti provided valuable assistance. Mann acknowledges the support of the Charles Tandy American Enterprise Center. A good portion of this work was completed while Locke was on the staff of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. However, the views expressed are the authors’ only and do not purport to represent the views of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or its staff. Do Professional Traders Exhibit Loss Realization Aversion? Abstract Recent evidence (e.g. Odean, 1998a) describes investor behavior...
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...Σύμφωνα με μια παλιά παροιμία της Wall Street, οι αγορές επηρεάζονται από δύο παράγοντες: τον φόβο και την απληστία. Αν και σε μεγάλο βαθμό αυτό είναι αληθές, η συγκεκριμένη κατηγοριοποίηση είναι ιδιαίτερα υπεραπλουστευμένη, αφού δεν πρέπει να ξεχνάμε ότι οι αγορές αποτελούνται από άτομα και το ανθρώπινο μυαλό είναι ιδιαίτερα πολυσύνθετο. Επιπλέον τα συναισθήματα είναι τόσο πολύπλοκα που ο φόβος και η απληστία αδυνατούν να περιγράψουν με ακρίβεια το σύνολο των ψυχολογικών παραγόντων που επηρεάζουν τα άτομα κατά τη διαδικασία λήψης επενδυτικών αποφάσεων. Όπως είναι γνωστό, η παραδοσιακή χρηματοοικονομική επιστήμη έχει επικεντρωθεί στην ανάπτυξη εργαλείων που χρησιμοποιούν οι επενδυτές για να μεγιστοποιήσουν την αναμενόμενη απόδοση και να ελαχιστοποιήσουν τον κίνδυνο που αναλαμβάνουν. Η προσπάθεια αυτή αποδείχθηκε πολύ αποτελεσματική και αναδείχθηκαν χρήσιμα επενδυτικά εργαλεία όπως είναι τα υποδείγματα αποτίμησης αξιογράφων, η θεωρία χαρτοφυλακίου, το υπόδειγμα εξισορροπητικής κερδοσκοπίας κ.λπ. Αν και οι επενδυτές θα έπρεπε να χρησιμοποιούν αυτά τα εργαλεία κατά τη διαδικασία λήψης των επενδυτικών τους αποφάσεων, συνήθως δεν το πράττουν, καθώς φαίνεται ότι η ψυχολογία επηρεάζει τις επενδυτικές αποφάσεις σε μεγαλύτερο βαθμό από την χρηματοοικονομική θεωρία. Σαν αποτέλεσμα, μια σειρά από συμπεριφορικά σφάλματα δυσχεραίνουν την επενδυτική διαδικασία, καθώς οι επενδυτές αλλά και οι διαχειριστές χαρτοφυλακίων (fund managers) διαπράττουν αποδεδειγμένα μια σειρά από επενδυτικά...
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...THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE • VOL. LVI, NO. 4 • AUGUST 2001 Investor Psychology and Asset Pricing DAVID HIRSHLEIFER* ABSTRACT The basic paradigm of asset pricing is in vibrant f lux. The purely rational approach is being subsumed by a broader approach based upon the psychology of investors. In this approach, security expected returns are determined by both risk and misvaluation. This survey sketches a framework for understanding decision biases, evaluates the a priori arguments and the capital market evidence bearing on the importance of investor psychology for security prices, and reviews recent models. The best plan is . . . to profit by the folly of others. — Pliny the Elder, from John Bartlett, comp. Familiar Quotations, 9th ed. 1901. IN THE MUDDLED DAYS BEFORE THE RISE of modern finance, some otherwisereputable economists, such as Adam Smith, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Harry Markowitz, thought that individual psychology affects prices.1 What if the creators of asset-pricing theory had followed this thread? Picture a school of sociologists at the University of Chicago proposing the Deficient Markets Hypothesis: that prices inaccurately ref lect all available information. A brilliant Stanford psychologist, call him Bill Blunte, invents the Deranged Anticipation and Perception Model ~or DAPM!, in which proxies for market misvaluation are used to predict security returns. Imagine the euphoria when researchers discovered that these mispricing proxies...
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...Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Vol. 64 (2007) 250–268 Myopic loss aversion, disappointment aversion, and the equity premium puzzleଝ David Fielding a , Livio Stracca b,∗ b a Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand European Central Bank (ECB), Kaiserstrasse 29, 60311 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Received 7 March 2003; accepted 5 July 2005 Available online 24 May 2006 Abstract This paper takes a close look at the “behavioural finance” explanations of the equity premium puzzle, namely myopic loss aversion [Benartzi, S., Thaler, R.H.,1995. Myopic loss aversion and the equity premium puzzle. Quarterly Journal of Economics 110, 73–92] and disappointment aversion [Ang, A., Bekaert, G., Liu, J., 2005. Why stocks may disappoint. Journal of Financial Economics 76, 471–508]. The paper proposes a simple specification of loss and disappointment aversion and brings these theories to the data. The main conclusion is that a highly short-sighted investment horizon is required for the historical equity premium to be explained by loss aversion, while reasonable values for disappointment aversion are found also for long investment horizons; stocks may not only lose in the short term, but also disappoint in the long term. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: G11; G12 Keywords: Myopic loss aversion; Disappointment aversion; Equity premium puzzle; Investment horizon; Reference dependence 1. Introduction The...
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...Title Page Introduction a. Global Health Issues b. Economic Impact Behavioral Finance a. Emotional Biases i. Risk Aversion ii. Regret Aversion Market Implications a. Every market in today’s economy was impacted either directly or indirectly by the SARS epidemic. i. Most saw measurable decreases in GDP b. Global cost of lost economic activity due to SARS was approximately $54 billion Conclusion a. Economic damage caused by SARS can be attributed to the behavioral finance emotional biases of loss aversion and regret aversion affecting investors globally. Global Health Issues, Behavioral Finance and the Markets: The Role of Behavioral Finance in how Global Health Issues Impact the Economy Jonathan Davis David A Kennedy Lee V Smith Tayler T Young Syed Zain T Zaidi November 10, 2015 University of Houston- Downtown Global Health Issues, Behavioral Finance and the Markets: The Role of Behavioral Finance in how Global Health Issues Impact the Economy With globalization on the rise, infectious diseases that appear in one country have the opportunity to spread rapidly to others. Recent examples include the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the 2014 outbreak of the Ebola virus. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 8,098 individuals became infected worldwide with SARS and 774 of those individuals ultimately died from the illness (CDC, 2005). While Ebola killed 5,160 out of the 14,098 people...
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...Human Behavior and the Efficiency of the Financial System by Robert J. Shiller* Abstract Recent literature in empirical finance is surveyed in its relation to underlying behavioral principles, principles which come primarily from psychology, sociology and anthropology. The behavioral principles discussed are: prospect theory, regret and cognitive dissonance, anchoring, mental compartments, overconfidence, over- and underreaction, representativeness heuristic, the disjunction effect, gambling behavior and speculation, perceived irrelevance of history, magical thinking, quasimagical thinking, attention anomalies, the availability heuristic, culture and social contagion, and global culture. Theories of human behavior from psychology, sociology, and anthropology have helped motivate much recent empirical research on the behavior of financial markets. In this paper I will survey both some of the most significant theories (for empirical finance) in these other social sciences and the empirical finance literature itself. Particular attention will be paid to the implications of these theories for the efficient markets hypothesis in finance. This is the hypothesis that financial prices efficiently incorporate all public information and that prices can be regarded as optimal estimates of true investment value at all times. The efficient markets hypothesis in turn is based on more primitive notions that people behave rationally, or accurately maximize expected utility, and are able...
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...European Financial Management, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007, 12–29 doi: 10.1111/j.1468-036X.2007.00415.x Behavioural Finance: A Review and Synthesis Avanidhar Subrahmanyam Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles, USA E-mail: subra@anderson.ucla.edu Abstract I provide a synthesis of the Behavioural finance literature over the past two decades. I review the literature in three parts, namely, (i) empirical and theoretical analyses of patterns in the cross-section of average stock returns, (ii) studies on trading activity, and (iii) research in corporate finance. Behavioural finance is an exciting new field because it presents a number of normative implications for both individual investors and CEOs. The papers reviewed here allow us to learn more about these specific implications. Keywords: behavioural finance, market efficiency, cross-section of stock returns JEL classifications: G00, G10, G11, G14, G31, G32, G34 1. Introduction The field of finance, until recently, had the following central paradigms: (i) portfolio allocation based on expected return and risk (ii) risk-based asset pricing models such as the CAPM and other similar frameworks, (iii) the pricing of contingent claims, and (iv) the Miller-Modigliani theorem and its augmentation by the theory of agency. These economic ideas were all derived from investor rationality. While these approaches revolutionised the study of finance and brought rigour into the field, many lacunae...
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...asp Thank-you very much for downloading the printable version of this tutorial. As always, we welcome any feedback or suggestions. http://www.investopedia.com/contact.aspx Table of Contents 1) Behavioral Finance: Introduction 2) Behavioral Finance: Background 3) Behavioral Finance: Anomalies 4) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Anchoring 5) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Mental Accounting 6) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Confirmation and Hindsight Bias 7) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Gambler's Fallacy 8) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Herd Behavior 9) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Overconfidence 10) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Overreactions and Availability Bias 11) Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Prospect Theory 12) Behavioral Finance: Conclusion Introduction According to conventional financial theory, the world and its participants are, for the most part, rational "wealth maximizers". However, there are many instances where emotion and psychology influence our decisions, causing us to behave in unpredictable or irrational ways. Behavioral finance is a relatively new field that seeks to combine behavioral and cognitive psychological theory with conventional economics and finance to provide explanations for why people make irrational financial decisions. By the end of this tutorial, we hope that you'll have a better understanding of some of the anomalies (i.e., irregularities) that conventional financial theories have failed to explain...
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...managers; 4.2 A “Bubble” is an episode in which irrational thinking or a friction causes the price of an asset to rise to a level that is higher than it would be in the absence of the friction or the irrationality; and, moreover, the price level is such that a rational observer, armed with all available information, would forecast a low long-term return on the asset (Barberis, 2010). 4.3 Two categories of theories explaining “Bubble Formation” (Why an asset class might become overvalued): 1. “Investor Beliefs Based” theories; 2. “Investor Preferences Based” theories; 4.4 Three “Belief-Based” theories of “Bubble Formation” (Barberis, 2010): First theory argues that a bubble forms when investors disagree sharply about an asset’s future prospects and there are short-sale constraints. Second theory argues that bubbles arise because investors extrapolate past outcomes – returns, earnings growth, or default rates – too far into the future. Third theory is based on overconfidence – specifically, on the idea that people overestimate the precision of their forecasts (overconfidence on reliability of favorable information). 1 4.5 Two “Preference-Based” theories in “Bubble Formation”: First theory argues that investors become less risk averse because of “House Money Effect”, which in short, means having experienced gains, they are less concerned about future losses because any losses will be cushioned by the prior gains....
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...Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Prospect Theory Key Concept No.8: Prospect Theory Traditionally, it is believed the net effect of the gains and losses involved with each choice are combined to present an overall evaluation of whether a choice is desirable. Academics tend to use "utility" to describe enjoyment and contend that we prefer instances that maximize our utility. However, research has found that we don't actually process information in such a rational way. In 1979, Kahneman and Tversky presented an idea called prospect theory, which contends that people value gains and losses differently, and, as such, will base decisions on perceived gains rather than perceived losses. Thus, if a person were given two equal choices, one expressed in terms of possible gains and the other in possible losses, people would choose the former - even when they achieve the same economic end result. According to prospect theory, losses have more emotional impact than an equivalent amount of gains. For example, in a traditional way of thinking, the amount of utility gained from receiving $50 should be equal to a situation in which you gained $100 and then lost $50. In both situations, the end result is a net gain of $50. However, despite the fact that you still end up with a $50 gain in either case, most people view a single gain of $50 more favorably than gaining $100 and then losing $50. Evidence for Irrational Behavior Kahneman and Tversky conducted a series of studies...
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