Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We offer a model of familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains the endowment effect, portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases....

We offer a model in which sequences of individuals often converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, despite communication of the payoff outcomes from past choices. This reflects both direct and indirect action-based information externalities. In contrast with previous cascades...

We demonstrate that limited participation can arise endogenously in the presence of model uncertainty and heterogeneous uncertainty-averse investors. When uncertainty dispersion among investors is small, full participation prevails in equilibrium. Equity premium is related to the average...

We demonstrate that limited participation can arise endogenously in the presence of model uncertainty. Our model generates novel predictions on how limited participation relates to equity premium and diversification discount. When the dispersion in investors' model uncertainty is small, full...

This article studies information blockages and the asymmetric release of information in a security market with fixed setup costs of trading. In this setting, "sidelined" investors may delay trading until price movements validate their private signals. Trading thereby internally generates the...

Parity, and whether the test is cross-sectional versus time series.

This paper offers an explanation for the forward discount puzzle in foreign exchange markets based upon investor overconfidence. In our model, overconfident individuals overreact to their information about future inflation differential. The spot and the forward exchange rates differentially...