Behavioral Finance The Second Generation

Behavioral finance presented in this book is the second-generation of behavioral finance. The first generation, starting in the early 1980s, largely accepted standard finance’s notion of people’s wants as “rational” wants—restricted to the utilitarian benefits of high returns and low risk. That first generation commonly described people as “irrational”—succumbing to cognitive and emotional errors and misled on their way to their rational wants. The second generation describes people as normal. It begins by acknowledging the full range of people’s normal wants and their benefits—utilitarian, expressive, and emotional—distinguishes normal wants from errors, and offers guidance on using shortcuts and avoiding errors on the way to satisfying normal wants. People’s normal wants include financial security, nurturing children and families, gaining high social status, and staying true to values. People’s normal wants, even more than their cognitive and emotional shortcuts and errors, underlie answers to important questions of finance, including saving and spending, portfolio construction, asset pricing, and market efficiency.

A definitive guide to the growing field of behavioral finance This reliable resource provides a comprehensive view of behavioral finance and its psychological foundations, as well as its applications to finance. Comprising contributed chapters written by distinguished authors from some of the most influential firms and universities in the world, Behavioral Finance provides a synthesis of the most essential elements of this discipline, including psychological concepts and behavioral biases, the behavioral aspects of asset pricing, asset allocation, and market prices, as well as investor behavior, corporate managerial behavior, and social influences. Uses a structured approach to put behavioral finance in perspective Relies on recent research findings to provide guidance through the maze of theories and concepts Discusses the impact of sub-optimal financial decisions on the efficiency of capital markets, personal wealth, and the performance of corporations Behavioral finance has quickly become part of mainstream finance. If you need to gain a better understanding of this topic, look no further than this book.

Classical and behavioral finance are often seen as being at odds, but the idea of “popularity” has been introduced as a way of reconciling the two approaches. Investors like or dislike various characteristics of securities for rational reasons (as in classical finance) or irrational reasons (as in behavioral finance), which makes the assets popular or unpopular. In the capital markets, popular (unpopular) securities trade at prices that are higher (lower) than they would be otherwise; hence, the shares may provide lower (higher) expected returns.This book builds on this idea and expands it in two major ways. First, it introduces a rigorous asset pricing model, the popularity asset pricing model (PAPM), which adds investor preferences for security characteristics other than the risk and expected return that are part of the capital asset pricing model. A major conclusion of the PAPM is that the expected return of any security is a linear function of not only its systematic risk (beta) but also of all security characteristics that investors care about. The other major contribution of the book is new empirical work that, while confirming the well-known premiums (such as size, value, and liquidity) in a popularity context, supports the popularity hypothesis on the basis of portfolios of stocks based on such characteristics as brand value, sustainable competitive advantage, and reputation. Popularity unifies the factors that affect price in classical finance with those that drive price in behavioral finance, thus creating a unifying theory or bridge between classical and behavioral finance.

The area of behavioral finance, though relatively young, has matured and spread beyond its initial objectives: to demonstrate the fallibility of the efficient market hypothesis, to shake the belief in the ubiquity of rational decision making, and to convince the finance world of the importance of psychological biases in decision making. The success of the field in meeting its goals, however, has called into question its continued relevance. Behavioral finance is thus currently at a crossroads, and researchers need to decide which way they should turn for the area to continue to thrive and to meaningfully contribute to financial knowledge.This collection of papers deals with rarely-explored topics to point at new directions that behavioral finance should explore to maintain its viability, along with contributions to traditional topics. Some of these topics include innovations, the psychology of policy-makers, biases of peer-to-peer market participants, the behavior and motivation behind corporate social responsibility, and the design of exchanges. Additionally, well-known topics such as the disposition effect, slow and fast decisions and the availability heuristic are revisited, and surprising new findings are presented.By opening the field to novel avenues of discussion, this book addresses the future of behavioral finance and its transition into a new era.

Behavioral finance presented in Finance for Normal People is a second generation behavioral finance. The first generation, starting in the early 1980s, largely accepted standard finance's notion of people's wants as “rational” wants - restricted to the utilitarian benefits of high returns and low risk. That first generation commonly described people as “irrational” - succumbing to cognitive and emotional errors and misled on their way to their rational wants. The second generation describes people as normal. It begins by acknowledging the full range of people's normal wants - hope for riches and freedom from the fear of poverty, nurturing our children and families, being true to our values, gaining high social status, playing games and winning, and more. It distinguishes normal wants from errors, and offers guidance on using shortcuts and avoiding errors on the way to satisfying normal wants. People's normal wants, even more than their cognitive and emotional shortcuts and errors, underlie answers to important questions of finance, including saving and spending, portfolio construction, asset pricing, and market efficiency. These are presented in this book.We often hear that behavioral finance is nothing more than a collection of stories about irrational people misled by cognitive and emotional errors, that it lacks the unified structure of standard finance. Yet today's standard finance is no longer unified because wide cracks have opened between its theory and the evidence. This book offers behavioral finance as a unified structure that incorporates parts of standard finance, replaces others, and includes bridges between theory, evidence, and practice.

This proceedings volume presents current research and innovative solutions into capital markets, particularly in Poland. Featuring contributions presented at the 10th Capital Market Effective Investments (CMEI 2018) conference held in Międzyzdroje, Poland, this book explores the future of capital markets in Poland as well as comparing it with the capital markets of other developed regions around the world. Divided into four parts, the enclosed papers provide a background into the theoretical foundations of capital market investments, explores different approaches—both classical and contemporary—to investment decision making, analyzes the behaviors of investors using experimental economics and behavioral finance, and explores practical issues related to financial market investments, including real case studies. In addition, each part of the book begins with an introductory chapter written by thematic editors that provides an outline of the subject area and a summary of the papers presented.

This book will take your understanding of finance to the next level. The Story of Behavioral Finance is about "finance in the real world"-it's finance theory with real people and real institutions. What happens when your portfolio manager sets out not to maximize your return but rather to maximize his own compensation and minimize his own career risk? Why didn't rational investors short high-flying Internet companies back in 1999? Why was it that so many of the firms that went public in 1999 and 2000 for hundreds of millions of dollars subsequently went bankrupt? These are the types of questions that will be answered in this book. The Story of Behavioral Finance will cover a lot of ground. We will cover the two main strands of behavioral finance, investor psychology and limits to arbitrage, and we'll apply these concepts to a wide array of financial market phenomena. We will explore, for example, why it is that almost no one seems to "beat the market" despite that fact that there are often easily spotted price inefficiencies.

Behavioural investing seeks to bridge the gap between psychology and investing. All too many investors are unaware of the mental pitfalls that await them. Even once we are aware of our biases, we must recognise that knowledge does not equal behaviour. The solution lies is designing and adopting an investment process that is at least partially robust to behavioural decision-making errors. Behavioural Investing: A Practitioner’s Guide to Applying Behavioural Finance explores the biases we face, the way in which they show up in the investment process, and urges readers to adopt an empirically based sceptical approach to investing. This book is unique in combining insights from the field of applied psychology with a through understanding of the investment problem. The content is practitioner focused throughout and will be essential reading for any investment professional looking to improve their investing behaviour to maximise returns. Key features include: The only book to cover the applications of behavioural finance An executive summary for every chapter with key points highlighted at the chapter start Information on the key behavioural biases of professional investors, including The seven sins of fund management, Investment myth busting, and The Tao of investing Practical examples showing how using a psychologically inspired model can improve on standard, common practice valuation tools Written by an internationally renowned expert in the field of behavioural finance