This paper provides a behavioral analysis of BP, whose capital budgeting decisions in the last decade have resulted in a series of high profile accidents, including the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The analysis uses BP as a vehicle to discuss the application of business...

This is the introduction to the book, “What Investors Really Want.” The book centers on behavioral finance, drawing from research in finance, psychology and marketing, and combining systematic studies with anecdotes and recent events. The book presents the cognitive errors that bedevil...

Typical risk questionnaires aimed at helping advisors guide investors are deficient in five ways. First, each investor has a multitude of risk tolerances, one for each goal and its mental account. Probes for one global risk tolerance miss that multitude. Second, the links between answers to...

We are in the midst of what might end up as the most significant change to financial regulations since the Great Depression. This is because the financial and economic crisis that continues to engulf us is the most severe crisis since the Great Depression. The markets for houses, mortgages, and...

Why were the returns of stocks with low book-to-market ratios and high market capitalization's lower, on average, than the returns of stocks with high book-to-market ratios and low market capitalization's? In this paper we pit the characteristics hypothesis against the affect hypothesis. The...

A belief that markets are efficient is blamed for instigating the crisis we are in and lulling us into complacency as the crisis was approaching. But the debate about the role of such belief in the crisis is unfocused for two reasons. First, a lack of a common definition of market efficiency...

Do stocks of admired companies yield admirable returns? Are increases in admiration followed by high stock returns? And how reliable is the relation between admiration and returns? These are the questions we answer in this paper. We study Fortune magazine's annual list of “America's Most...