It is well established that international portfolios are far substantially under-diversified, contrary to predictions of traditional finance theory. Even after controlling for market segmentation and “investability” of foreign markets, portfolio under-diversification remains a puzzle. I...

We present the results of a simple, easily replicable, survey study based on lottery bonds. It is aimed at testing whether agents make investment decisions according to expected utility, cumulative prospect theory or optimal expectations theory, when they face skewed distributions of returns. We...

In this paper, we present the results of a simple, easily replicable, survey study based on lottery bonds. It is aimed at testing whether agents make investment decisions according to expected utility, cumulative prospect theory (Tversky-Kahneman, 1992) or optimal expectations theory...

In this article, a simple paper-and-pencil experiment, based on lottery bonds, shows that financial decisions taken by participants are inconsistent with the traditional view of economic agents as risk averse expected utility maximizers. First, our results cast doubt on the relevance of variance...

We examine the relation between testosterone, cortisol, and financial decisions in a sample of naïve investors. We find that testosterone level is positively related to excess risk-taking, whereas cortisol level is negatively related to excess risk-taking (correlation coefficient [r]: 0.75 and...

This study investigates the effect of underlying risk preferences on analysts' work-related decisions. Specifically, we examine whether facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), an innate personal characteristic that has been linked to financial risk tolerance, affects analysts' stock coverage...

There is growing empirical evidence that risk preferences change based on financial market conditions. This paper explores individual predictors of time varying risk aversion among participants in U.S. defined contribution plans using a unique dataset with daily responses to a risk tolerance...

Risk is one of the key aspects in financial decision-making and therefore an integral part of the behavioral economics and finance literature. Focusing on the conceptualization of the term "risk", which researchers have addressed from numerous angles, this comment aims to offer a critical...

We present results from a highly powered online experiment with 937 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) that examined whether MTurkers exhibit myopic loss aversion (MLA). The experiment consisted of measuring MLA-compliant behavior in two between-subjects treatments that differed only...