We find that institutional investors' local culture of religiosity influences their stock lending decisions and short-sell constraints. Firms with higher ownerships by blockholders located in more religious counties are associated with higher utilization of lendable shares. This effect is driven...

We model limited attention as incomplete usage of publicly available information. Informed players decide whether or not to disclose to observers who sometimes neglect either disclosed signals or the implications of non-disclosure. In equilibrium observers are unrealistically optimistic,...

We derive a separation theorem: investors hold a common risk-adjusted market portfolio regardless of their information sets, and a portfolio based upon their private signals. This implies that investors have non-negligible holdings of assets they know little about, so nonparticipation remains a...

Individual investors often invest actively and lose thereby. Social interaction seems to exacerbate this tendency. In the model here, senders' propensity to discuss their strategies' returns, and receivers' propensity to be converted, are increasing in sender return. The rate of conversion of...

This paper models firms' choices between alternative means of presenting information, and the effects of different presentations on market prices when investors have limited attention and processing power. In a market equilibrium with partially attentive investors, we examine the effects of...

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 propose a theory of securities market under- and overreactions based on two well-known psychological biases: investor overconfidence about the precision of private information; and biased self-attribution, which causes asymmetric shifts in investors' confidence as a function of their...

The basic paradigm of asset pricing is in vibrant flux. The purely rational approach is being subsumed by a broader approach based upon the psychology of investors. In this approach, security expected returns are determined by both risk and misvaluation. This survey sketches a framework for...