It is an important issue for economic and finance applications to determine whether individuals exhibit a behavioral bias towards pessimism in their beliefs, in a lottery or more generally in an investment opportunities framework. In this paper, we analyze the answers of a sample of 1,540...

We provide a discipline for belief formation through a model of subjective beliefs, in which agents hold incorrect but strategic beliefs. More precisely, we consider beliefs as a strategic variable that agents can choose (consciously or not) in order to maximize their utility at the equilibrium....

Can investors with irrational beliefs be neglected as long as they are rational on average? Does unbiased diagreement lead to trades that cancel out with no consequences on prices, as implicitly assumed by the traditional models? We show in this paper that there is an important impact of...

We provide a discipline for belief formation through a model of subjective beliefs, in which agents hold incorrect but strategic beliefs. More precisely, we consider beliefs as a strategic variable that agents can choose (consciously or not) in order to maximize their utility at the equilibrium....

Can behavioral investors be neglected as long as they are rational on average? We show in this paper that there is an important impact of such investors on the behavior of financial markets, even though the pricing formulas are quot;on averagequot; (over the states of the world) unchanged. In...

In this paper, we show that behavioral features can be obtained at a group level when the individuals of the group are heterogeneous enough. More precisely, starting from a standard model of Pareto optimal allocations, with expected utility maximizers and exponential discounting, but allowing...

The problem of fair pricing of contingent claims is well understood in the contex of an arbitrage free, complete financial market, with perfect information: the so-called arbitrage approach permits to construct a unique valuation operator compatible with observed price processes. In the more...

Our aim is to analyze the link between optimism and risk aversion in a subjective expected utility setting and to estimate the average level of optimism when weighted by risk tolerance. This quantity is of particular importance since it characterizes the consensus belief in risk-taking...

We analyze the link between pessimism and risk-aversion. We consider a model of partially revealing, competitive rational expectations equilibrium with diverse information, in which the distribution of risk-aversion across individuals is unknown. We show that when a high individual level of...

In this paper, we characterize subjective probability beliefs leading to a higher equilibrium market price of risk. We establish that Abel's result on the impact of doubt on the risk premium is not correct (see Abel, A., 2002. An exploration of the effects of pessimism and doubt on asset...