The “gambler’s fallacy” is the false belief that a random event is less likely to occur if the event has occurred recently. Such beliefs are false if the onset of events is in fact independent of previous events. We study gender differences in the gambler’s fallacy using data from the...

Nowadays many employers offer their employees the possibility of an insurance against too large losses in income when retiring or becoming disabled. This paper models the optimization problem of the employer when setting up such a so-called pension fund. not surprisingly, it turns out that the...

We investigate the "law of small numbers" using a unique panel data set on lotto gambling. Because we can track individual players over time, we can measure how they react to outcomes of recent lotto drawings. We can therefore test whether they behave as if they believe they can predict lotto...

In this paper we propose a new rule to allocate risk capital to portfolios or divisions within a firm. Specifically, we determine the capital allocation that minimizes the excesses of sets of portfolios in lexicographical sense. The excess of a set of portfolios is defined as the expected loss...

Abstract: Little is known about how different bonus schemes affect traders’ propensity to trade and which bonus schemes improve traders’ performance. We study the effects of linear versus threshold (convex) bonus schemes on traders’ behavior. Traders purchase and sell shares in an...

A positive relation between confidence and effort/investment provision has been<br/>theoretically justified and practically assumed in the literature, but has not been<br/>thoroughly investigated. We test and confirm this positive relation between direct<br/>measures of confidence and choice of effort or...