Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote disproportionate attention to already-known positive information about the performance of...

Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information, and is distinct from the 'news utility' that arises from gaining new information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote...

The disposition effect is regarded as a property of an individual stock: If an investor has made a loss on a stock, he or she is less likely to sell it, whereas if an investor has made a gain on a stock, he or she is more likely to sell it. This means that the more stocks in a portfolio are in...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification—NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)—equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification—NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)—equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases...

We use a large dataset of individual investor stock trades to demonstrate that investors are more likely to sell stocks with larger price changes in the previous day. This is consistent with investors trying to learn about the firms' fundamentals from stock returns. Our core contribution is to...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification--NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)--equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases of...

Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote disproportionate attention to already-known positive information about the performance of...