We conduct controlled experiments in order to analyze individual trading behavior. Our results suggest that investors measure their gains relative to their initial wealth, and that this reference point together with past stock price changes determine the portfolio choices. Subjects choose a...

The prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the cumulative prospect theory of Tversky and Kahneman (1992) are descriptive models for decision making that summarize several violations of the expected utility theory. This paper gives a survey of applications of prospect theory to the...

The disposition effect is the observation that investors hold winning stocks too long and sell losing stocks too early. A standard explanation of the disposition effect refers to prospect theory and in particular to the asymmetric risk aversion according to which investors are risk averse when...

Economists have forcefully argued for the introduction and use of property derivatives as a hedge against house price risk (e.g. Shiller and Weiss, 1999). The rationale for these financial instruments seems clear, as many households are heavily invested in housing and standard financial...

The paper rst shows that nancial market equilibria need not to exist if agents possesscumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. This is due tothe boundary behavior of the cumulative prospect theory value function, which might causean innite short-selling...

Assuming investors are loss averse, repeated risky investments are less attractive inmyopic evaluation. A theoretical foundation for this effect is given by the behavioralconcept of myopic loss aversion (MLA). The consequences of MLA have been confirmedin several between-subject experimental...

Structured financial products have gained more and more popularity in recent years, but nevertheless has their success so far notthoroughly been analyzed. In this article we develop a theoreticalframework for the design of optimal structured products and analyzethe maximal utility gain for an...

It is well known that the class of strong (Generalized) AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (or GARCH) processes is not closed under contemporaneous aggregation. This paper provides the dynamics followed by the aggregate process when the individual persistence parameters are drawn from...

The estimation of multivariate GARCH models remains a challenging task, even in modern computer environments. This manuscript shows how Independent Component Analysiscan be used to estimate the Generalized Orthogonal GARCH model in a fraction of the time otherwise required. The proposed method...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the Dow Jones index. First, we use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it is more powerful and not restricted only to the best...