Growing evidence shows that biological factors affect individual financial decisions that could be reflected in financial markets. Testosterone, a chemical messenger especially influential in male physiology, has been shown to affect economic decision making, and is taken as a...

In real world financial markets, dividend processes as well as fundamental values are governed by imprecision; neither the objective probabilities of returns nor the actual amounts of possible returns are known for certain. With a novel experimental approach, we analyze the impact of risk,...

The house-money effect – people's tendency to be more daring with easily-gotten money – is a behavioral pattern that poses questions about the external validity of experiments in economics: to what extent do people behave in experiments like they would have in a real-life situation, given...

In this paper, we present the results of a simple, easily replicable, survey study based on lottery bonds. It is aimed at testing whether agents make investment decisions according to expected utility, cumulative prospect theory (Tversky-Kahneman, 1992) or optimal expectations theory...

Risk aversion is as prevalent as it is expensive. For financial traders this is especially true. This paper proposes a solution for alleviating the behavior using a model implied from experiments on myopic loss aversion and tests the model on retail currency traders from a large online database....

In this article, a simple paper-and-pencil experiment, based on lottery bonds, shows that financial decisions taken by participants are inconsistent with the traditional view of economic agents as risk averse expected utility maximizers. First, our results cast doubt on the relevance of variance...

We present the results of a simple, easily replicable, survey study based on lottery bonds. It is aimed at testing whether agents make investment decisions according to expected utility, cumulative prospect theory or optimal expectations theory, when they face skewed distributions of returns. We...

Decisions are often postponed even when future profits are not expected to compensate for the losses. This is especially relevant for financial and entrepreneurial disinvestment choices, as investors often have a disposition to hold on to losing assets for too long. We use an experiment with...

This paper investigates how loss-aversion affects individuals' decisions on savings and insurance purchase. Specifically, this paper empirically tests if prospect theory's loss aversion decreases insurance demand and increases savings demand. Prospect theory predicts that boundedly rational...

The notion of optimism or pessimism is defined in the psychology literature in terms of forecasting where the term is used more generally than in statistics. Here we use the theory of loss aversion combined with Bayesian forecasting to propose rather precise definitions of optimism and...