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...

This paper studies the investment behavior of investors and fund managers within the mutual funds industry. We find that investors are biased in their fund purchase decisions in a way described by prospect theory: The prospect theory value predicts future fund flows, even though it is not...

This paper investigates how loss-aversion affects individuals' decisions on savings and insurance purchase. Specifically, this paper empirically tests if prospect theory's loss aversion decreases insurance demand and increases savings demand. Prospect theory predicts that boundedly rational...

Suppose an investment manager has discretion to allocate the timing of client contributions or management fees over a calendar year. If her client has prospect theory preferences and anchors gains and losses to the previous account balance, then the manager's optimal timing of account inflows...

The literature reports a tendency that future losses are discounted less than future gains, the so-called sign effect in intertemporal decision making. In this article, we study implications of the sign effect on risk taking: If future losses are discounted less than future gains, mixed...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...

Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency investments we demonstrate that this...

This paper considers a general-equilibrium model with loss-aversion in consumption and heterogeneity: there is a continuum of agents, with s-shaped utility, who differ in the time-varying reference level of consumption. Heterogeneity in the reference level is crucial for the existence of the...

According to the behavioral concept of myopic loss aversion (MLA), investors are more willing to take risks if they are less frequently informed about their portfolio performance. This prediction of MLA has been confirmed in various experimental studies and the conclusion has been drawn that...

Returns to both traditional and risk-managed momentum strategies are non-normal, reducing the efficacy of the Sharpe ratio as an evaluation tool. To account for the higher moments of the return distribution, we evaluate momentum using the framework of myopic loss aversion. Under this framework,...