Behavioral Finance
The central issue in behavioral finance is explaining why market participants make systematic errors. Such errors affect prices and returns, creating market inefficiencies. It also investigates how other participants arbitrage such market inefficiencies.
Behavioral finance highlights inefficiencies such as under- or over-reactions to information as causes of market trends (and in extreme cases of bubbles and crashes). Such reactions have been attributed to limited investor attention, overconfidence, overoptimism, mimicry (herding instinct) and noise trading. Technical analysts consider behavioral economics' academic cousin, behavioral finance, to be the theoretical basis for technical analysis.
Other key observations include the asymmetry between decisions to acquire or keep resources, known as the "bird in the bush" paradox, and loss aversion, the unwillingness to let go of a valued possession. Loss aversion appears to manifest itself in investor behavior as a reluctance to sell shares or other equity, if doing so would result in a nominal loss. It may also help explain why housing prices rarely/slowly decline to market clearing levels during periods of low demand.
Benartzi and Thaler (1995), applying a version of prospect theory, claim to have solved the equity premium puzzle, something conventional finance models have been unable to do so far. Experimental finance applies the experimental method, e.g. creating an artificial market by some kind of simulation software to study people's decision-making process and behavior in financial markets.
Read more about this topic: Behavioral Economics, Issues in Behavioral Economics
Famous quotes containing the word finance:
“A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)