We perform an experimental study of complexity to assess its effect on trading behavior, price volatility, liquidity, and trade efficiency. Subjects were asked to deduce the value of a particular asset from information they were given about the composition and price of several portfolios....

A basic tenet of financial economics is that asset prices change in response to unexpected fundamental information. Since Roll's (1988) provocative presidential address that showed little relation between stock prices and news, however, the finance literature has had limited success reversing...

We provide new empirical evidence suggesting that the marginal investor in mutual funds behaves differently across market conditions. If the marginal investor allocates capital across mutual funds rationally, then the relative performance of funds should be unpredictable. We find however that...

We study the impact of model disagreement on the dynamics of asset prices, return volatility, and trade in the market. In our continuous-time framework, two investors have homogeneous preferences and equal access to information, but disagree about the length of the business cycle. We show that...

How do differences of opinion affect asset prices? Do investors earn a risk premium when disagreement arises in the market? Despite their fundamental importance, these questions are among the most controversial issues in finance. In this paper, we use a novel data set that allows us to directly...

The growing use of on-line educational content and related video services has changed the way people access education, share knowledge, and possibly make life decisions. In this paper, we characterize how video content affects individual decision-making and willingness to share in the context of...

Given the importance of sound advice in retail financial markets and the fact that financial institutions outsource their advice services, what legal rules maximize social welfare in the market? We address this question by posing a theoretical model of retail markets in which a firm and a broker...

We develop a theoretical model to study the effects of libertarian paternalism on knowledge acquisition and social learning. Individuals in our model are permitted to appreciate and use the information content in the default options set by the government. We show that in some settings...

Psychologists study regret primarily by measuring subjects' attitudes in laboratory experiments. This does not shed light on how expected regret affects economic actions in market settings. To address this, we use proprietary data from a blackjack table in Las Vegas to analyze how expected...

Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we...