Mullainathan et al [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] present a model of coarse thinking or analogy based thinking. The essential idea behind coarse thinking is that people put situations into categories and the values assigned to attributes in a given situation are affected by the...

We show that unconditionally efficient returns do not achieve the maximum unconditional Sharpe ratio, neither display zero unconditional Jensen’s alphas, when returns are predictable. Next, we define a new type of efficient returns that is characterized by those unconditional properties. We...

We propose new spanning tests that assess if the initial and additional assets share the economically meaningful cost and mean representing portfolios. We prove their asymptotic equivalence to existing tests under local alternatives. We also show that unlike two-step or iterated procedures,...

An anchoring adjusted currency option pricing formula is developed in which the risk of the underlying currency is used as a starting point which gets adjusted upwards to arrive at the currency call risk. Anchoring bias implies that such adjustments are insufficient. The new formula converges to...

Market professionals with decades of experience typically argue that a call option is a surrogate for the underlying asset, indicating that they perceive the risk of a call option as similar to the risk of the underlying asset. Experimental evidence also points to the same conclusion. Such...

People tend to think by analogies and comparisons. Such way of thinking, termed coarse thinking by Mullainathan et al [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] is intuitively very appealing. We develop a new option pricing model based on the idea that the market consists of coarse thinkers as...

The principle of no arbitrage says that identical assets should offer the same returns. However, experimental and anecdotal evidence suggests that people often rely on analogy making while valuing assets. The principle of analogy making says that similar assets should offer the same returns. I...

We put forward a new option pricing formula based on the notion that people tend to think by analogies and comparisons. The new formula differs from the Black Scholes formula due to the appearance of a parameter in the formula that captures the risk premium on the underlying. The new formula,...

People tend to think by analogies. We investigate whether thinking-by-analogy matters for investors’ willingness to pay for a risky asset in a laboratory experiment. We find that thinking-by-analogy has a strong influence when the assets in question have similar (but not identical) payoffs....

Two main approaches are commonly used to empirically evaluate linear factor pricing models: regression and SDF methods, with centred and uncentred versions of the latter. We show that unlike standard two-step or iterated GMM procedures, single-step estimators such as continuously updated GMM...