We investigate, using the 2002 US Health and Retirement Study, the factors influencing individuals' insecurity and expectations about terrorism, and study the effects these last have on households' portfolio choices and spending patterns. We find that females, the religiously devout, those...

This heterogeneous interacting agents model of a financial market is a generalization of the model proposed by Westerhoff (The Use of Agent-Based Financial Market Models to Test the Effectiveness of Regulatory Policies) by traders who are allowed to have different investment horizons as...

Markov chains have experienced a surge of economic interest in the form of behavioral agent-based models that aim at explaining the statistical regularities of financial returns. We review some of the relevant mathematical facts and show how they apply to agent-based herding models, with the...

This agent-based financial market model is a generalization of the model of Westerhoff (The Use of Agent-Based Financial Market Models to Test the Effectiveness of Regulatory Policies) by traders who are allowed to have different investment horizons as introduced by Demary (Who Does a Currency...

This paper examines financial professionals' overconfidence in their forecasting performance. We are the first to compare individual financial professionals' self-ratings with their true forecasting performance. Data spans several years at monthly frequency. The forecasters in our sample do not...

We study the dynamics of a Lucas-tree model with finitely lived agents who "learn from experience." Individuals update expectations by Bayesian learning based on observations from their own lifetimes. In this model, the stock price exhibits stochastic boom-and-bust fluctuations around the...

The paper proposes an elementary agent-based asset pricing model that, invoking the two trader types of fundamentalists and chartists, comprises four features: (i) price determination by excess demand; (ii) a herding mechanism that gives rise to a macroscopic adjustment equation for the market...

Financial disclosure documents provide investors with product details to facilitate informed investment decisions. We investigate whether the appearance - the visual frame - of disclosure documents impacts risk and return expectations and investment behavior. In our experiment, subjects decide...

Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex evolutionary systems. Agents are boundedly rational and base their investment decisions upon market forecasting heuristics....

We study an investment experiment conducted with a representative sample of German households. Respondents invest in a safe asset and a risky asset whose return is tied to the German stock market. Experimental investments correlate with beliefs about stock market returns and exhibit desirable...