Narrow bracketing in combination with loss aversion has been shown to reduce individual risk-taking. This is known as myopic loss aversion (MLA) and has been corroborated by many studies. Recent evidence has contested this notion indicating that MLA's applicability is confined to highly...

We investigate determinants of price expectations and satisfaction levels of financial professionals and students. In experiments with 150 professionals and 576 students, we systematically vary price paths according to the final return (positive or negative) and the way the final return is...

A pervasive feature in the finance industry is relative performance, which can include extrinsic (money), intrinsic (self-image), and reputational (status) motives. In this paper, we model a portfolio decision with two assets and investigate how reputational motives (i.e., the public...

Rankings are a pervasive feature of the finance industry. Although they have no direct monetary consequences, rankings provide utility for intrinsic (positive self-image) and extrinsic (status) reasons. We recruit a unique subject pool of 204 financial professionals and investigate how anonymous...

Two aspects of social context are central to the finance industry: (i) financial professionals make investment decisions for customers and (ii) social competition/rankings are a pervasive feature. We link both lines of literature to investigate professionals' risk-taking behavior when investing...

We examine in an experiment the causes, consequences and possible cures of myopic loss aversion (MLA) for investment behaviour under risk. We find that both, investment horizons and feedback frequency contribute almost equally to the effects of MLA. Longer investment horizons and less frequent...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness preferences at the individual level. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degree stochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of the experiment. We find that the skewness of a distribution has a...

We study portfolio diversification in an experimental decision task, where asset returns depend on a draw from an ambiguous urn. Holding other information identical and controlling for the level of ambiguity, we find that labeling assets as being familiar or from the homeland of subjects...

By running a battery of incentivized and non-incentivized experiments with fund managers from four countries in the European Union, we investigate the impact of fund managers' cognitive skills and economic preferences on the dynamics of the mutual funds they manage. First, we find that fund...

We investigate how the experience of extreme events, such as the COVID-19 market crash, influence risk-taking behavior. To isolate changes in risk taking from other factors, we ran controlled experiments with finance professionals in December 2019 and March 2020. We observe that their...