In the 18th century Britain frequently issued lottery loans, selling bonds whose sizewas determined by a draw soon after the sale. The probability distribution was perfectly known ex-ante and highly skewed. After the draw the bonds were identical (except for size) and indistinguishable from...

In the 18th century Britain frequently issued lottery loans, selling bonds whose size was determined by a draw soon after the sale. The probability distribution was perfectly known ex-ante and highly skewed. After the draw the bonds were identical (except for size) and indistinguishable from...

Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

This paper investigates whether the overpricing of out-of-the money single stock calls can be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1992) cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We hypothesize that these options are expensive because investors overweight small probability events and overpay for...

The combination of credit constraints and indivisible consumption goods may induce some risk-averse individuals to gamble to have a chance of crossing a purchasing threshold. One implication of this is that income effects for individuals who choose to gamble are likely to be larger than for the...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat native random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

Behavioral biases like disposition effect and over-confidence have received much attention as a potential driver of numerous anomalies observed in the markets. Also, it has been argued that information uncertainty tends to exacerbate these biases and induce stronger irrational behavior among...

We show in a simple framework that momentum trading can exist in equilibrium and momentum trading is profitable. Properties of the model fit the empirics well. First, the model captures in a parsimonious manner both short-term overreaction and long-term reversals. Second, it predicts that...