We provide evidence that people do not consistently incorporate their beliefs into investment decisions. Our experimental findings indicate that selling is considerably less belief-driven than buying. This difference stems from selling decisions in the presence of paper losses for which we...

This study documents experimental evidence that naïve beliefs about the behavior of others contribute to excessive trading. The mechanism is based on the idea that when people process new information they naïvely neglect other market participants' reaction to the information and consequently...

Investors perceive stocks of companies with fluent names as more profitable. This perception may result from two different channels: direct, non-deliberate affect toward fluent names or indirect, deliberate interpretation of fluent names as a signal for company quality. We present a...

Greed has been shown to be an important economic motive. Both the popular press as well as scientific papers have mentioned questionable practices by greedy bankers and investors as one of the root causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. In spite of these suggestions, there is as of yet no...

This paper investigates the effect of monetary policy on stock market bubbles and trading behavior in experimental asset markets. For this purpose, we introduce the possibility of investing in interest bearing bonds to the widely used laboratory asset market design of Smith, Suchanek, and...

According to the behavioral concept of myopic loss aversion (MLA), investors are more willing to take risks if they are less frequently informed about their portfolio performance. This prediction of MLA has been confirmed in various experimental studies and the conclusion has been drawn that...

Despite the compelling evidence on gain-loss-domain-dependent behavior, research on domaindependent portfolio diversification is scarce. We recruited 251 experienced US retail investors to participate in a controlled experiment. Their task was to select portfolios that differ in asset...

Most textbook finance literature assumes risk to be the standard deviation of returns (volatility), which is not only used by academics but also financial advisors, regulators and more. This paper comprehensively examines whether volatility is consistent with investors’ actual perception of...