Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Do Firms Overreact To The Enactment Of Corporate Laws: Evidence From Anti-Price Gouging Laws, Mario Marshall

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The enactment of state corporate laws increases attention to issues related to price fairness.I present evidence that firms become less efficient in generating margins but not revenue upon enacting anti-price gouging laws. This finding is consistent with a prediction of salience theory that increased attention to unfair pricing induces firms to adopt more conservative pricing strategies. I provide evidence that companies that are more sensitive to unfair pricing risks have larger changes in efficiency. The results are consistent with the salience theory of choice and imply that attention that corporate laws generate may substantially impact firms.

Does Time Equal Money? Temporal Discounting And Self-Control: Insight Into The Rationality Of Personal Financial Decision-Making, Joshua Epstein

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Exponential and hyperbolic intertemporal choice models have been widely investigated to measure an individual’s degree of impulsivity in behavioral economics. Hyperbolic discounting research identifies subject’s disproportionately high subjective value to immediate rewards, to the extent that it is not in their best interest. Furthermore, preference reversals have shown subjective value demonstrates an inversely relationship proportional to delay.

Investigation into whether visual representations influence conservative personal finance savings behavior was demonstrated in this study by presenting a multitude of visualizations before allocation of limited monetary resources. Evaluation of the neighbor effect was tested to determine whether comparing individuals to their peers …

A Bibliometric Analysis Of Behavioral Finance And Behavioral Accounting, Bharati Singh

American Business Review

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of relevant publications in the field of behavioral finance and behavioral accounting. The analysis shows that the emerging themes of research in recent years in behavioral finance is on investors’ sentiment, social media, investors’ attention, and financial literacy. In the field of behavioral accounting, biases such as  overconfidence, framing effects or cognitive constraints on information processing, have been explored in greater detail. Other than cognitive biases, this field includes studies such as behavioral tax, organizational ecology, and performance evaluative style of organization, among others. Interestingly, our analysis suggests that research in behavioral accounting …

Behavioral Finance For The Individual Investor, Drake Gens

Senior Honors Theses

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has been generally accepted in academia despite its well-researched flaws; by understanding how and when markets deviate from efficiency, investors have an opportunity to not only better understand their investing habits, but also possibly generate higher investment returns. Various market anomalies, such as the Value Effect (De Bondt & Thaler, 1985), the Monday Effect (French, 1980), and the January Effect (De Bondt and Thaler, 1958 & 1987), attest to the fact that markets experience periods of deviation from efficiency. Fiévet and Sornette (2016) finding that markets experience inefficiency during periods of significant volatility is confirmed …

Why Is Las Vegas Busy Everyday? A Behavioural Analysis Of Impact Investors’ Attitude And Decision-Making Process, Isha Shah

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Remarking a discrepancy in the statistics of a growing influence of impact investment and yet its restrictive inclusion in the financial market has encouraged this inductive research to take an alternative approach to address the impact investment market. In an emic perspective, this study aims to assess the factors motivating individuals and institutions to pursue impact investment. Further, it also investigates some elements that guide the decision making of the investors in this field. The qualitative nature of the research demands exceptional secondary sources and it is rendered more credible with the inclusion of three relevant primary sources. The analysis …

A Dual-Role Analysis Of Game Form Misconception And Cognitive Bias In Financial And Economic Decision Making, Chinedum D. Nwadiora

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The endowment and the framing effect are widely examined cognitive biases. The experimental economics literature, using choice data gathered through an elicitation device, commonly finds evidence of these biases. Recent work by Cason & Plott (2014) shows that the interpretation of choice data as consistent with biases related non-standard preference theory could also be consistent with confusion or misconception of the game type used to elucidate preferences. I use the Cason and Plott card auction framework to analyze offers of buyers and sellers in an experimental setting with subjects from the University of New Orleans simulating 97 sellers and 90 …

Behavioral Finance And Its Impact On Investing, Jordan Fieger

Senior Honors Theses

The field of behavioral finance has seen incredible growth over the past half century as it has explored the effect that cognitive psychological biases can have on investors’ financial decisions. Behavioral finance stands in stark contrast to the efficient market hypothesis, as it attributes market inefficiencies to investors who are not perfectly rational human beings. It offers a solution to the observed 3.5% gap that active equity investors miss out on in the market compared to passive index funds, which it attributes to their emotions and psychological biases. These common human biases can be grouped into five major categories: heuristics, …

Stock Loan Lotteries And Individual Investment Performance, Jordan Moore

Rohrer College of Business Faculty Scholarship

Individual investors trade excessively, sell winners too soon, and overweight stocks with lottery features and low expected returns. This paper models a financial innovation to address these biases and improve individual investor performance. Individual investors pledge shares of stock to an exchange for multiple periods and face a steep penalty for redeeming shares early. The exchange lends the shares to institutions and holds a lottery with the lending fees. I extend the Barberis and Xiong (2009) discrete-time model of realization utility to include stock loan lotteries. Investors with cumulative prospect theory preferences are reluctant to forgo trading opportunities for fixed …

Macro Disagreement And The Cross-Section Of Stock Returns, Frank Weikai Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines the effects of macro-level disagreement on the cross-section of stock returns. Using forecast dispersion measure from Survey of Professional Forecasters database, I find that when forecast dispersion on macroeconomic factor is high, stocks that have high loadings on that factor earn lower future returns relative to stocks with low loadings and vice versa. This negative relationship between risk premium of macro-factors and macro-level disagreement is robust and exists for a large set of macroeconomic risk factors. These findings are consistent with the model of Hong and Sraer (2015), where high beta stocks are more prone to speculative …

In Equations We Trust? Formula Learning Effects On The Exponential Growth Bias, Bryan Foltice, Thomas Langer

Bryan Foltice

This paper evaluates the possible benefits and drawbacks of the formal formula learning of compound growth as it pertains to eliminating, or at least reducing, the exponential growth bias in various household savings and debt decisions. In our main experimental study, we determine if the ability to calculate the simple compound savings formula only assists in its direct area of application with an available calculator, or if this knowledge extends into similar exponentially-based savings and debt decisions when either a calculator is prohibited or when the formula is unknown. In the process of tackling this research question, we develop a …

In Equations We Trust? Formula Learning Effects On The Exponential Growth Bias, Bryan Foltice, Thomas Langer

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

This paper evaluates the possible benefits and drawbacks of the formal formula learning of compound growth as it pertains to eliminating, or at least reducing, the exponential growth bias in various household savings and debt decisions. In our main experimental study, we determine if the ability to calculate the simple compound savings formula only assists in its direct area of application with an available calculator, or if this knowledge extends into similar exponentially-based savings and debt decisions when either a calculator is prohibited or when the formula is unknown. In the process of tackling this research question, we develop a …

Building A Better Mousetrap: Enhanced Dollar Cost Averaging, Lee Dunham, Geoffrey C. Friesen

Department of Finance: Faculty Publications

This paper presents a simple, intuitive investment strategy that improves upon the popular dollarcost- averaging (DCA) approach. The investment strategy, which we call enhanced dollar-costaveraging (EDCA), is a simple, rule-based strategy that retains most of the attributes of traditional DCA that are appealing to most investors but yet adjusts to new information, which traditional DCA does not. Simulation results show that the EDCA strategy reliably outperforms the DCA strategy in terms of higher dollar-weighted returns about 90% of the time and nearly always delivers greater terminal wealth for reasonable values of the risk premium. EDCA is most effective when applied …

Reflexivity In Financial Markets: A Neuroeconomic Examination Of Uncertainty And Cognition In Financial Markets, Steven Pikelny

Senior Projects Spring 2011

Financial markets exist to disperse the risks of an unknown future in an economy. But for this process to work in an optimal fashion, investors – and subsequently markets – must have a way to interpret uncertainty. The investor rationality and market efficiency literature utilizes a methodology inadequate to address this fact, so I supplement it with the perspectives of epistemology, economic sociology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. This approach suggests that what is commonly viewed as market “inefficiency” is not necessarily caused by investor irrationality, but rather by the inherent nature of the epistemological problem faced by …

Sportsbook Pricing And The Behavioral Biases Of Bettors In The Nhl, Rodney Paul, Andrew Weinbach

Rodney J. Paul

The betting market for the NHL is investigated using actual betting percentages on favorites and underdogs from real sportsbooks. Sportsbooks do not appear to attempt to price to balance the book as betting percentages are not proportional to set odds. As in the NFL and NBA, bettors are shown to have a strong preference for favorites and road favorites in particular. Simple strategies of betting against significant imbalances toward the favorite are shown to generate positive returns. Although not pricing to balance the book, sportsbooks do not appear to price to exploit known bettor biases in all cases. Clear bettor …

Sportsbook Pricing And The Behavioral Biases Of Bettors In The Nhl, Rodney Paul, Andrew Weinbach

Falk College Research Center

The betting market for the NHL is investigated using actual betting percentages on favorites and underdogs from real sportsbooks. Sportsbooks do not appear to attempt to price to balance the book as betting percentages are not proportional to set odds. As in the NFL and NBA, bettors are shown to have a strong preference for favorites and road favorites in particular. Simple strategies of betting against significant imbalances toward the favorite are shown to generate positive returns. Although not pricing to balance the book, sportsbooks do not appear to price to exploit known bettor biases in all cases. Clear bettor …

Household Financial Ratios: A Review Of Literature, Nathan Harness, Michael Finke, Swarn Chatterjee

Swarn Chatterjee

The literature on household financial ratios provides insight into the characteristics related to meeting common investment asset, debt, and liquidity guidelines. We know much about the contemporaneous relation between ratios and household characteristics, but the literature exploring the impact of meeting ratio thresholds on subsequent financial success is in its infancy. Ratios can be useful heuristics that efficiently provide information about financial status as well as a prescriptive guideline to motivate more efficient financial behavior. While the existing literature provides some insight into which households have adequate ratios, there are opportunities for additional empirical scrutiny and application of household resource …

Effects Of Friendship In Transactions In An Emerging Market: Empirical Evidence From Brazil, Wesley Mendes-Da-Silva

Wesley Mendes-Da-Silva

This paper considers the inclusion of human behavioral aspects and implications of cognitive psychology and anthropology in decisions relating to the emerging field of behavioral finance. The formulated hypotheses were tested using 400 questionnaires, answered by students enrolled in MBA programs. The principal results suggest that individuals involved in transactions among friends or among strangers assume different behaviors—friends agree about the price attributed to an asset, while strangers show the propensity to bargain.

A Face Can Launch A Thousand Shares (And A 0.80% Abnormal Return), Matteo Arena, John Howe

Matteo P. Arena

In this paper we examine the market reaction—price and volume—to the appearance of a firm in the Who’s News column of The Wall Street Journal. We differentiate between those firms whose articles are accompanied by a picture of an executive and a control set of firms whose articles on the same day are not accompanied by a picture. The results show a more pronounced market reaction to the “cum picture” articles, consistent with the incomplete information theory of Merton [1987] and the heuristic-based familiarity hypothesis. There is no evidence of significant long-run abnormal performance for the sample firms.