Preferences under risk: content-dependent behavior and psychological processing

A common view in economics and psychology is that decision agents achieve their choices and express their respective preferences by computing probabilistic properties (probabilities and money) from a decisionmaking context (e.g., von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1947; Tversky and Kahneman, 1992; Starmer, 2000). In this computational processing, the main psychological mechanism requires that decision agents are able to integrate economic (contextual) attributes such as money and probabilities into subjective values; in other words people are able to construct and employ psycho-economic scales. Subsequently, when making a choice, decision agents are supposed to perform tradeoffs between the computed outputs (psycho-economic variables such as expected values) and certain monetary alternatives (see Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Tversky and Kahneman, 1992

Which heuristics can aid financial-decision-making?

© 2015 Elsevier Inc. We evaluate the contribution of Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, often in association with his late co-author Amos Tversky, to the development of our understanding of financial decision-making and the evolution of behavioural finance as a school of thought within Finance. Whilst a general evaluation of the work of Kahneman would be a massive task, we constrain ourselves to a more narrow discussion of his vision of financial-decision making compared to a possible alternative advanced by Gerd Gigerenzer along with numerous co-authors. Both Kahneman and Gigerenzer agree on the centrality of heuristics in decision making. However, for Kahneman heuristics often appear as a fall back when the standard von-Neumann-Morgenstern axioms of rational decision-making do not describe investors' choices. In contrast, for Gigerenzer heuristics are simply a more effective way of evaluating choices in the rich and changing decision making environment investors must face. Gigerenzer challenges Kahneman to move beyond substantiating the presence of heuristics towards a more tangible, testable, description of their use and disposal within the ever changing decision-making environment financial agents inhabit. Here we see the emphasis placed by Gigerenzer on how context and cognition interact to form new schemata for fast and frugal reasoning as offering a productive vein of new research. We illustrate how the interaction between cognition and context already characterises much empirical research and it appears the fast and frugal reasoning perspective of Gigerenzer can provide a framework to enhance our understanding of how financial decisions are made

Betting on odds on Favorites as an Optimal Choice in Cumulative Prospect Theory

It is well known that the parametric version of Cumulative Prospect theory (CPT) proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and Tversky and Kahneman (1992) (KT) can explain gambling at actuarially unfair odds on long shots due to the over weighting of small probabilities. However betting on odds favorites appears problematic. We demonstrate using a parametric model of Cumulative Prospect Theory that nests that of Kahneman and Tversky that if agents are risk averse enough over gains and risk-seeking enough over losses then they will gamble on odds on chances at actuarially unfair odds even when there is no probability distortion. This previously unappreciated fact is interesting since many experimental results suggest that some respondents are very risk averse over gains.

Understanding happiness: the distinction between living - and thinking about it

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman discusses happiness as an indicator of social progress.

Bank Risk-Taking in a Prospect Theory Framework Empirical Investigation in the Emerging Markets’ Case

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the validity of some behavioral conjectures as alternative explanations of bank risk-taking behavior. We especially focus on the different valuation of gains and losses relative to a reference point, and the changing attitude toward risk conditional on the domain (gains vs losses) features (Tversky and Kahneman 1992). We follow a methodology based on Fiegenbaum and Thomas (1988) and the Fishburn (1977) measure of risk, applied to a sample of banks from emerging market economies. Preliminary results show that the Tversky and Kahneman (1992) framework could provide an alternative for explaining risk-taking behavior in the banking industry. Bankers located above benchmark levels, exhibit risk aversion. Although, further investigations are needed in order to consolidate our conclusions.Cumulative Prospect Theory, bank risk taking, emerging market economies

And You Think Having Children Will Make You Happy! A Case of Focusing Illusion

Using Kahneman and Schkade's (1998) idea of focusing illusion, this paper attempts to explain why having children does not always bring us the kind of happiness we anticipated to have before our decision to having them.