Prior research shows that investors with smaller belief updates trade less actively, which positively affects their return performance. We examine the effect of different default frames of presenting past return information on investors' belief updating. In particular, we analyze whether...

Individual investors' beliefs (return expectations and risk perceptions) drive investment decisions, with larger updates of beliefs leading to more active trading, hurting performance. We examine how framing of past performance information affects investors' belief formation. In particular, we...

The study at hand deals with the expectations of professional analysts and novices in the context of foreign exchange markets. We analyze the respective forecasting accuracy and our results indicate that there exist substantial differences between professional forecasts and judgmental forecasts...

We design an experiment to test the hypothesis that, in violation of Bayes Rule, some people respond more forcefully to the strength of information than to its weight. We provide incentives to motivate effort, use naturally occurring information, and control for risk attitude. We find that the...

Human judgments are systematically affected by various biases and distortions. The main goal of our study is to analyze the effects of five well-documented behavioral biases—namely, the disposition effect, herd behavior, availability heuristic, gambler’s fallacy and hot hand fallacy—on the...

We provide a preference-based rationale for endogenous overconfidence. Horizon-dependent risk aversion, combined with a possibility to forget, can generate overconfidence and excessive risk taking in equilibrium. An "anxiety prone" agent, who is more risk-averse to imminent than to distant...

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...

This study examines whether heterogeneous beliefs contribute to the incidence of the disposition effect. We measure optimism using elicited beliefs from incentivized experiments and surveys and link these measures to investment decisions using administrative register data. We find that...

Confident investors trade more than less confident investors, but why? Prior research tests the ultimate relation between investor confidence and trading, but does not empirically examine the underlying mechanism that explains why confidence leads to trading. We complement the literature by...

Combining brokerage records and matching monthly survey measurements of a sample of individual investors from the Netherlands for the period April 2008 through March 2009, we examine how individual investors update their beliefs (return expectations and risk perceptions) and preferences (risk...