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...

By discriminating between a lazy manager and a career concerns hypothesis, Aghion et al. (The American Economic Review 2013, 103(1), 277-304) try to disentangle the link between innovation and institutional ownership. Citation-weighted patent counts are used as a proxy for innovation, which...

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...

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...

Risk-assessment and risk-taking in various forms are among the most important tasks financial professionals face in their daily work. A large body of experimental studies has shown a substantial effect of the decision domain (gain vs loss domain) on risk-taking, predominantly among students. In...

Financial literacy and economic preferences are considered to be important drivers of health, income, and general well-being. In this paper we bridge the gap between studies on financial literacy and research on economic preferences by how they interplay with each other and the field behavior of...

In this paper we investigate how the experience of stock market shocks, like the COVID-19 crash, influences risk taking behavior. To isolate changes in risk taking from a variety of other confounding factors during stock market crashes, we ran controlled experiments with finance professionals in...

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...

The efficiency of financial markets and their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency. To close this gap, we run 86 experimental markets with 294...

With a novel experimental design we investigate whether risk perception, return expectations, and investment propensity are influenced by the scale of the vertical axis in charts. We explore this for two presentation formats, namely return charts and price charts, where we depict low- and...