How do prior outcomes affect risk attitude?

Modelling choice in multi-period asset pricing requires assumptions about how prior outcomes affect risk attitude. We present an experimental study of the influence of prior outcomes on risky choice. We document a strong framing effect. By manipulating the presentation format of the decision problem we can induce increased risk taking following a gain, i.e. the house-money effect (Thaler and Johnson 1990) or, alternatively, increased risk taking following a loss, i.e. escalation of commitment (Staw 1976). Maximization of a value function from prospect theory can explain some of our results. Escalation of commitment in our experiment does not appear to be driven by a need to justify or rationalize the initial decision

Losing Sight of the Trees for the Forest? Attention Allocation and Anomalies

This paper tests asset pricing implications of the investor attention shift hypothesis proposed in recent theoretical work. We create a novel proxy for the dynamics of inattention towards firm-specific information and explore its impact on prominent return anomalies. As hypothesized and with all else equal, the proxy positively predicts the post-earnings-announcement drift and negatively predicts the success of momentum strategies. Moreover, it has explanatory power for the profitability of pairs trading, a promising yet widely neglected setting concerned with the relative pricing efficiency of economically linked stocks. Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of time-varying investor attention allocation

The trading volume impact of local bias : evidence from a natural experiment

Exploiting several regional holidays in Germany as a source of exogenous cross-sectional variation in investor attention, we provide evidence that the well-known local bias at the individual level materially affects stock turnover at the firm level. The German setting offers favorable characteristics for this natural experiment. Stocks of firms located in holiday regions are temporarily strikingly less traded, both in statistical and economic terms, than otherwise very similar stocks in non-holiday regions. This negative turnover shock is robust and survives various tests for cross-sectional differences in information release. It is particularly pronounced in stocks less visible to non-local investors, and for smaller stocks disproportionately driven by retail investors. Our findings contribute to research on local bias, determinants of trading activity and limited attention

How should private investors diversify? : An empirical evaluation of alternative asset allocation policies to construct a "world market portfolio"

This study evaluates the out-of-sample performance of numerous asset allocation strategies from the perspective of a Euro zone investor. Besides an increased sample period from January 1973 to December 2008, our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we compare the performance of a broad spectrum of heuristic portfolio policies with a large set of well-established model extensions of the Markowitz (1952) mean-variance framework. Second, we explicitly differentiate between two prominent ways of diversification that are usually analyzed separately: international diversification in the stock market and diversification over different asset classes. Our analysis allows us to compare and discuss different diversification strategies to construct a "world market portfolio" that is as ex-ante efficient as possible. For international equity diversification, we find that none of the Markowitz-based portfolio models is able to significantly outperform simple heuristics. Among those, the GDP weighting dominates the traditional cap-weighted approach. In the asset allocation case, Markowitz models are again not able to beat a broad spectrum of fixed-weight alternatives out-of-sample. Analyzing more than 5000 heuristics, we find that in fact almost any form of well-balanced allocation over asset classes offers similar diversification gains as even very sophisticated and recently developed portfolio optimization approaches. Based on our findings, we suggest a simple and cost-efficient allocation approach for private investors

Wie diversifiziere ich richtig? : Eine Diskussion alternativer Asset Allocation Ansätze zur Konstruktion eines "Weltportfolios"

Die vorliegende Studie evaluiert die Effizienz verschiedener Ansätze zur Vermögensallokation aus Sicht eines deutschen Privatanlegers. Neben einem erweiterten Zeitraum von 1973 bis 2007 tragen wir dabei in zweifacher Hinsicht zur Literatur bei. Erstens vergleichen wir heuristische Strategien mit wissenschaftlichen Optimierungsmodellen im Sinne von Markowitz (1952). Zweitens unterscheiden wir in der Untersuchung zwischen zwei prominenten, aber häufig getrennt voneinander analysierten Diversifikationsformen: einer geographischen Streuung des Anlagevermögens im Aktienbereich und einer Verteilung des Anlagevermögens auf verschiedene Anlageklassen. Hierzu berücksichtigen wir neben Aktien zusätzlich Renten und Rohstoffe. Die Zusammenführung dieser beiden Aspekte resultiert in der Diskussion denkbarer Aufteilungsmechanismen zur Konstruktion eines möglichst effizienten "Weltportfolios". In der empirischen Analyse erweist sich im Fall einer Diversfikation im Aktienbereich kein theoretisch fundiertes Optimierungsmodell gegenüber heuristischen Ansätzen als überlegen. In dieser Kategorie weist eine fundamentale, BIP-basierte Gewichtung signifikant bessere Ergebnisse als eine Marktkapitalisierungsgewichtung auf. Eine simple Gleichgewichtung erzielt zudem, in Übereinstimmung mit DeMiguel et al. (2008), mit Optimierungsverfahren vergleichbare Resultate. Auch unter Einbeziehung von Renten und Rohstoffen bieten Markowitz-Modelle out-of-sample keine besseren Ergebnisse als heuristische, auf zeitstabilen Gewichten beruhende Ansätze, die wir aus bestehenden Empfehlungen in der Literatur ableiten und auf ihre Robustheit hin Überprüfen. Auf Grundlage unserer Resultate schlagen wir daher einen einfach und kostengünstig zu implementierenden Ansatz zur Vermögensallokation für Privatanleger vor

How should individual investors diversify? An empirical evaluation of alternative asset allocation policies

This paper evaluates numerous diversification strategies as a possible remedy against widespread costly investment mistakes of individual investors. Our results reveal that a very broad range of simple heuristic allocation schemes offers similar diversification gains, as well-established or recently developed portfolio optimization approaches. This holds true for both international diversification in the stock market and diversification over different asset classes. We thus suggest easy-to-implement allocation guidelines for individual investors