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...

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....

In this paper we experimentally test skewness preferences at the individual level. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degree stochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of the experiment. We find that the skewness of a distribution has a...

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...

This paper uses non-parametric methods to study the efficiency (Dybvig, 1988 and Post, 2003) and risk-profiles (Varian, 1988) of dynamic portfolio choices. We design an experiment which varies the number of states (complexity), and includes an equivalent static Arrow-Debreu problem. The results...

We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which subjects dynamically choose to allocate their portfolio between (i) a safe asset, (ii) a risky asset and (iii) a skewed asset with negative expected value (a bet ), in an environment where they can sometimes choose to acquire some...

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...

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...

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...