The satisficing approach with its three constituent processes, aspiration formation,satisficing, and aspiration adjustment, is formally elaborated for a specificclass of portfolio selection tasks. It is partly poorly confirmed by experimentaldata, indicating that bounded rationality requires...

In a stochastic duopoly market, sellers must form state-specific aspirationsexpressing how much they want to earn given their expectationsabout the other's behavior. We define individually and mutually satisficingsales behavior for given individual beliefs and aspiration profiles. In afirst...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches,especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed byincluding behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although thisnew development is most welcome, the...

A vast literature shows that individuals frequently fail to identify the normative solutionsin logical reasoning tasks. Much attention has been devoted to the study ofthese deviations at the individual level; less effort was exerted to investigate whetherinstitutional settings might facilitate...

How do people make investment decisions when they receive outcome feedback? We examinedhow well the standard mean-variance model and two reinforcement models predict people’sportfolio decisions. The basic reinforcement model predicts a learning process that relies solelyon the portfolio’s...

In the experimental scenario several agents repeatedly invest in n (n _ 2)state-specic assets. The evolutionarily stable and equilibrium (Blume andEasley, 1992) portfolio for this situation requires to distribute funds accordingto the constant probabilities of the various states. The dierent...

This paper investigates factors influencing individual portfolio allocations withparticular focus on the role of illusion of control. By forming their portfolio of tworisky lotteries and one risk-less alternative, subjects are requested to reach a targetinvestment profit, whereby equal...

An empirically well-established finding is that equity portfolios are concentratedin the domestic equity market of the investor. Previous theoreticaland empirical analyses have mainly focused on institutional explanations andlargely neglected individual behavior. In this study we report the...

We experimentally test overconfidence in investment decisions by offering participants the possibility to substitute their own for alternative investment choices.Overall, 149 subjects participated in two experiments, one with just one risky asset, the other with two risky assets. Overconfidence...