This book updates and advances the theory of expected utility as applied to risk analysis and financial decision making. Von Neumann and Morgenstern pioneered the use of expected utility theory in the 1940s, but most utility functions used in financial management are still relatively simplistic...

Mutual fund companies selectively advertise their better-performing funds. However, investors respond to advertised performance data as if those data were unselected (i.e., representative of the population). We identify the failure to discount selected or potentially selected data as selection...

This paper discusses whether psychological biases (overconfidence and mood), and social intelligence (in the form of self-monitoring) influence individual investors' decision making and their trading behaviour (trading frequency, volume and performance). Indeed, the literature review reveals...

Decision makers often save money for a specific goal by forgoing discretionary consumption and instead putting the money toward the savings goal. We hypothesized that reference points can be exploited to enhance this type of saving. In two hypothetical scenario studies, subjects made judgments...

Based on a survey of behavioral finance literature, this paper presents a descriptive model of individual investor behavior in which investment decisions are seen as an iterative process of interactions between the investor and the investment environment. This investment process is influenced by...

In this paper, we examine the role of national culture in corporate takeover decisions, by arguing that managerial risk tolerance (a combination of risk aversion and risk perception), at the national level, is a cultural trait and affects the expected net synergies CEOs require. We propose a...