What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given $25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61 young, quantitatively trained men and women to play this...

Arrow-Debreu state preference approach to derivatives pricing is embedded into decision theoretical framework. Derivatives prices are considered as decision variables. Axiomatic decision theory, concerned with the attitude toward uncertainty and existence of closed in *-weak topology sets of...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of individual attitudes towards ambiguity, based on laboratory experiments. The design of the analysis allows to capture individual behavior across various levels of ambiguity, ranging from low to high. Attitudes towards risk and attitudes towards...

We report an experiment where each subject's ambiguity sensitivity is measured by an ambiguity premium, a concept analogous to and comparable with a risk premium. In our design, some tasks feature known objective risks and others uncertainty about which subjects have imperfect, heterogeneous,...

We propose a model of instrumental belief choice under loss aversion. When new information arrives, an agent is prompted to abandon her prior. However, potential posteriors may induce her to take actions that generate a lower utility in some states than actions induced by her prior. These losses...

Because of limits to arbitrage, it is reasonable for sell-side analysts' target prices to deviate from their corresponding estimates of future fundamental value. Although this inequality does not imply that sell-side analysts should provide biased estimates of fundamental value, many do. A key...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification—NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)—equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases...

This paper shows that households' mortgage refinancing decisions suboptimally depend on uninformative reference points, imposing a friction to the refinancing channel of monetary policy. I study refinancing behavior in the UK, where on pre-determined dates initial fixed rates reset and...

Behavioural finance theories explain "why" individuals exhibit behaviours that do not maximize expected utility. Behavioural finance highlights inefficiencies, such as under- or over-reactions to information, as causes of market trends and, in extreme cases, of bubbles and crashes. Such...