We experimentally test overconfidence in investment decisions by offering participants the possibility to substitute their own for alternative investment choices. Overall, 149 subjects participated in two experiments, one with just one risky asset, the other with two risky assets. Overconfidence...

Loss aversion has been shown to be an important driver of people’s investment decisions. Encouraged by regulators, financial institutions are in search of ways to incorporate clients’ loss aversion in their risk classifications. The most critical obstacle appears to be the lack of a valid...

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been proposed as an explanation for the equity premium puzzle, and a number of experiments on students indicate that people do exhibit MLA. However, many people do not rely on their own judgment when making investment decisions, but obtain help from financial...

This paper analyzes gender differences in the disposition effect in an experiment based on Weber and Camerer (1998). The results emphasize that female investors realize less capital losses, have significantly higher disposition effects and are more loss averse than men

Most textbook finance literature assumes risk to be the standard deviation of returns (volatility), which is not only used by academics but also financial advisors, regulators and more. This paper comprehensively examines whether volatility is consistent with investors’ actual perception of...

Preference for control affects investment behavior. Participants of laboratory experiments invest different amount of money in a risky asset when face with two different methods of control which have identical payoff structure and probability distribution, but provide different sense of control....

The paper analyses on an experimental basis the phenomenon of non-optimal under-diversification in portfolio choice decisions and investigates the reasons behind it. The most important obstacles for optimal diversification are studied the correlation neglect hypothesis and the overconfidence...

We study the effect of variation in correlation on investment decision in an experimental two asset application. Comparison of allocations across problems suggests that subjects neglect probabilistic information on the joint distribution of returns and base their allocations on the observed...