lottery choice incentives complexity and decision time this paper reports the results of an experiment on lottery choice in which decision cost is measured as decision making time a simple decision cost model motivates this measurement and the experiment and predicts relationships between incentive mechanism manipulations and decision making time which are borne out in the experiment the decision cost model also suggests that decisions will change in the face of the incentive manipulations in the experiment this suggestion is borne out in a complex decision making environment but not in a simple one specification tests demonstrate that observed changes in subjects behavior are not merely due to changes in subject specific error variance one may conclude from this that the payoff dominance problem is a real issue in complex decision making experiments copyright 1993 by royal economic society

investment allocation decisions home bias and the mandatory ifrs adoption abstract we examine the familiarity hypothesis of home bias by studying how foreign ownership of swedish firms is affected by the mandatory adoption of ifrs we decompose foreign investors into institutional and non institutional investors foreign investors are further decomposed into eu ifrs adopting countries and non eu residents non ifrs adopting countries we analyse the equity investments of these foreign investor groups in sweden during the period of 2001 2007 we find that after the mandatory adoption of ifrs foreign ownership owners from countries that adopted ifrs and particularly those from the eu increased these effects are particularly strong in small firms foreign institutional investors increased their ownership stake after the mandatory ifrs adoption whereas foreign non institutional investments were not affected significantly by the ifrs adoption in contrast to ownership from non adopting countries ownership from the eu increased in firms with both more and less tangible assets similarly foreign ownership from the eu increased in firms with both concentrated ownership and dispersed ownership after the adoption because sweden has already had strict legal enforcement and a low level of earnings management prior to the adoption our results suggest that increased foreign ownership is due to better abilities to compare firms rather than an improved quality

why do foreigners invest in the united states abstract why are foreigners willing to invest over 2 trillion per year in the united states this paper tests various hypotheses and finds that standard portfolio allocation models and diversification motives are poor predictors of foreign holdings of u s liabilities instead foreigners hold greater shares of their investment portfolios in the united states if they have less developed financial markets the magnitude of this effect decreases with income per capita countries that trade more with the united states also have greater portfolio shares in u s equity and bond markets these results support recent theoretical work on the role of financial development in sustaining global imbalances and have important implications for whether the united states can continue to attract sufficient financing from abroad without major changes in asset prices and returns especially in bond markets

decisions error and heterogeneity probabilistic choices or choice errors may play an important supporting role in shaping observed risky choices and a variety of restrictions on such choice probabilities play the role of identifying restrictions in empirical decision research we test six restrictions in the context of common ratio effect data for a general class of theories of risky choice two restrictions one for aggregate and one for individual data are supported but none of the heterogeneity restrictions that make the aggregate data model powerful survive scrutiny nor do estimable parametric versions of the individual data model there is room for new stochastic identifying restrictions in empirical decision research

home bias in equity portfolios inflation hedging and international capital market equilibrium we test whether the home bias in equity portfolios is caused by investors trying to hedge inflation risk the empirical evidence is consistent with this motive only if investors have very high levels of risk tolerance and equity returns are negatively correlated with domestic inflation we then develop a model of international portfolio choice and equity market equilibrium that integrates inflation risk and deadweight costs using this model we estimate the levels of costs required to generate the observed home bias in portfolios consistent with different levels of risk aversion for a level of risk aversion consistent with standard estimates of the domestic equity market risk premium these costs are about a few percent per annum greater than observable costs such as withholding taxes thus the home bias cannot be explained by either inflation hedging or direct observable costs of international investment unless investors have very low levels of risk aversion article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

do trade costs in goods market lead to home bias in equities abstract two of the main puzzles in international economics are the consumption and the portfolio home biases we solve for international equity portfolios in a two country two good stochastic equilibrium model with trade costs in goods markets we show that introducing trade costs as suggested by obstfeld and rogoff obstfeld m rogoff k 2000a the six major puzzles in international macroeconomics is there a common cause nber macroeconomics annual 15 is not sufficient to explain these two puzzles simultaneously on the contrary we find that trade costs create a foreign bias in portfolios for reasonable parameter values this result is robust to the addition of non tradable goods for standard calibrations of the preferences

the determinants of cross border equity flows abstract we explore a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross border equity flows between 14 countries 1989 1996 we show that a gravity model explains international transactions in financial assets at least as well as goods trade transactions gross transaction flows depend on market size in source and destination country as well as trading costs in which both information and the transaction technology play a role distance proxies some information costs and other variables explicitly represent information transmission an information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors and the efficiency of transactions the geography of information is the main determinant of the pattern of international transactions while there is weak support in our data for the diversification motive once we control for the informational friction we broaden the scope of our results by presenting some evidence linking the results on equity transactions to equity holdings

stochastic choice an optimizing neuroeconomic model a model is proposed in which stochastic choice results from noise in cognitive processing rather than random variation in preferences the mental process used to make a choice is nonetheless optimal subject to a constraint on available information processing capacity that is partially motivated by neurophysiological evidence the optimal information constrained model is found to oer a better t to experimental data on choice frequencies and reaction times than either a purely mechanical process model of choice the drift diusion

market networks and corporate behavior data on market relations between a large population of corporations and investment banks are used to study the organization market interforce the pattern of direct market ties between a firm and its banks forms of interfaces range from a long term exclusive tie the relationship interface to many short lived episodic ties the transaction interface with hybrid forms between the two poles contrary to widespread belief the article finds that strong relationships still exist transactions interfaces are rare most firms use hybrid interfaces a firm s interface is conceptualized as the intentional result of its efforts to reduce dependence and exploit power advantages observed interfaces are shown to be related systematically to various power dependence concepts including resource intensity number of transactions and dollar amounts raised criticality the availability of resource alternatives power asymmetry between a firm and its main bank organization size standardization of exchange and

heterogeneity in risky choice behaviour in a broad population we analyse risk preferences using an experiment with real incentives in a representative sample of 1 422 dutch respondents our econometric model incorporates four structural parameters that vary with observed and unobserved characteristics utility curvature loss aversion preferences towards the timing of uncertainty resolution and the propensity to choose randomly rather than on the basis of preferences we find that all four parameters contribute to explaining choice behaviour the structural parameters are significantly associated with socio economic variables but it is essential to incorporate unobserved heterogeneity in each of them to match the rich variety of choice patterns in the data

the common consequence effect testing a unified explanation of recent mixed evidence abstract the common consequence effect is perhaps the most investigated violation of expected utility theory and yet no single generalised expected utility model convincingly organises the experimental data this paper reports a test of a modified version of expected cardinality specific utility theory with boundary effects neilson w s 1992 economics letters 39 275 278 which can explain some recent mixed evidence without recourse to subjective probability weighting models the results do not convincingly support the boundary effect hypothesis and neither support the more usual probability weighting arguments but do indicate instability in preferences largely consistent with event splitting effects

the risk adjusted uncovered equity parity abstract this paper explores the risk adjusted uncovered equity parity model to investigate a degree of market integration for four asian emerging markets relative to the u s japan and the u k from january 1994 to july 2008 the uncovered equity parity is revised to take into account of market risk in a framework of a portfolio rebalancing model evidence was found to strongly support our hypotheses market risk is significant in international capital flows between the asian emerging markets and the developed economies and it can help explain the failure of a traditional uncovered equity or interest parity model the relationship between returns and an appreciation of the exchange rate are divided between the asian emerging markets and the developed economies depending on the direction of capital flows

when are person tradeoffs valid the person tradeoff pto is commonly used in health economic applications however to date it has no theoretical basis the purpose of this paper is to provide this basis from a set of assumptions that together justify the most common applications of the pto method our analysis identifies the central assumptions in pto measurements we test these assumptions in an experiment but find only limited support for the validity of the pto

do domestic investors have an information advantage evidence from indonesia using transaction data from the jakarta stock exchange i find three pieces of evidence which indicate that domestic investors have an information advantage over foreign investors first foreign investors systematically buy at higher and sell at lower intra day prices than domestic investors second foreign investors tend to sell prior to large positive returns finally the permanent impact of foreign purchases is smaller than that of domestic purchases over time prices at which foreign investors trade have worsened while foreign selling prior to positive returns has disappeared

expected utility violations implications for agricultural and natural resource economics nomic toolkit they compare the dogged defense of eu by economists to that of a monty python character playing the role of a petstore owner disputing the state of an obviously dead parrot the shop owner goes through incredible machinations to avoid replacing the bird let us consider another analogy the behavior of a caged parrot can likely tell us very little about the behavior of parrots in the wild a biologist may want to incorporate the behavior of caged parrots into the study of wild birds but would undoubtedly need to be extremely careful about understanding the underlying differences in the opportunities and constraints faced by caged versus wild birds before inferring much about wild parrot behavior to some extent experimental violations of eu present us with the same problem as the hypothetical parrot biologist subjects in these risk experiments are in a setting and are completing tasks very different from the setting and tasks they face in their everyday economic and social context what is missing relates to the power of the rationality assumption discussed in friedman that relies not only on the person s skill but also on the feedback they receive from the market friedman s expert billiards players are selected by a market because of their skill in billiards and th se are the players who fit friedman s as if description 1 risk researchers should not ignore experimental data however before we eliminate eu we should more fully understand the underlying reasons for the experimental behavior that violates eu agricultural and natural resource economists are well suited to assess

a theory of anticipated utility abstract a new theory of cardinal utility with an associated set of axioms is presented it is a generalization of the von neumann morgenstern expected utility theory which permits the analysis of phenomena associated with the distortion of subjective probability

home bias at the fund level this paper presents new stylized facts on the distribution of the home bias at the fund level we find i a large heterogeneity in the degree of home bias across mutual funds ii a positive correlation between the size of funds and home bias and iii a positive correlation between the size of funds the number of foreign countries and the number of sectors in which they invest these facts constitute a challenge for existing theories this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

experimental investigations of errors in decision making under risk abstract many if not all of the recent theories of decision making under risk that have been developed in the light of experimentally observed violations of expected utility theory are essentially deterministic in nature yet it is clear that actual decision making contains a random or error component this paper surveys the assumptions that have been employed in previous analyses of such experimental data and tries to find better explanations both from an economic and an econometrics point of view of such errors hopefully such work will lead to a unified theory in which the stochastic component is an integral part

behavior in the centipede game a decision theoretical perspective the centipede game is a two player finite game of perfect information where a unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium appears to be intuitively unappealing and descriptively inadequate this paper analyzes behavior in the centipede game when a traditional game theoretical assumption that players maximize expected utility is relaxed we demonstrate the existence of a descriptively adequate subgame perfect equilibrium under two standard decision theoretical assumptions first players choose under uncertainty in a probabilistic manner as captured by embedding a core deterministic decision theory in a model of probabilistic choice second players adopt non linear decision weights and overweight the likelihood of rare events as captured for example by rank dependent utility or prospect theory

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

do non expected utility choice patterns spring from hazy preferences an experimental study of choice errors individuals often have only incompletely known preferences when choosing between pair wise gambles particular presentations of the choice problem may then passively encourage the use of some choice method to clarify the preference different presentational displays can then lead to choice patterns predicted by one or other generalised expected utility theory when a preference is not or cannot be constructed choices will be arbitrary i run an experiment that uses three different presentational displays and incorporates a strength of preference indicator the experiment investigates regret theory as an example of a generalised expected utility theory as preference strength is found to vary by display regret effects event splitting effects and choice reversals are all found to be display dependent it is suggested that the evidence is best explained by assuming incomplete eu preferences which are clarified by constructive heuristics rather than some generalised expected utility model coupled with an error term

the dynamics of international equity market expectations this paper develops a noisy rational expectations model of the way in which international investors adjust their expectations of asset payoffs in a given country in response not only to public information signals but also to private information signals whose precision differs across investors the model predicts that the perceptions of investors in one country about the future market returns in another country are related differently to realized past returns depending on their informational disadvantage relative to other investors the greater is that informational disadvantage the greater is the change in perception associated with returns the predictions are confirmed by monthly survey data of institutional money managers investing in developed markets from 1995 to 2000

preference reversals the impact of truth revealing monetary incentives researchers vigorously debate the impact of incentives in preference reversal experiments do incentives alter behavior and generate economically consistent choices lichtenstein and slovic 1971 document inconsistencies reversals in revealed preference in gamble pairs across paired choice and individual pricing tasks the observed pattern is inconsistent with stable underlying preferences expressed with simple errors lichtenstein and slovic 1973 and grether and plott 1979 introduce incentives but aggregate reversal rates change little these results fostered numerous replications and assertions that models of non stable preferences are required to explain reversals contrary to this research we find that incentives can generate more economically consistent behavior our reevaluation of existing experimental data shows that incentives have a clear impact by better aligning aggregate choices and prices the effect is sufficiently large that with truth revealing incentives a stable preferences with error model not only explains behavior but fits the data as well as any model possibly could

home bias risk differential and cultural spatial spillover effects abstract this paper aims to uncover the role of heterogeneity and spillover effects of return and risk on home bias associated with common background characteristics of trading countries we adopt a spatial panel model to utilize uniquely created weight matrices and capture the spatial spillover effects of the common background characteristics a modified definition of home bias is used to explore the role of market risks associated with the common characteristics of cross border portfolio flows in an international portfolio balance model using annual panel data of 17 countries spread over three different regions i e asia europe and others for the 2002 2012 period evidence strongly supports our hypothesis that the effects of the return and risk differentials of trading countries on home bias depend on the correlation of each of the common characteristics with return and risk

testing expected utility in the presence of errors one possible conclusion from recent experimental research on decision making under risk is that observed behaviour can be reasonably accommodated by expected utility plus an error term this conclusion implies that the violation rate of expected utility should decrease if errors are excluded this article reports on an experiment which investigates this implication by presenting the same choice problems to subjects three times the results show that the exclusion of errors leads to a significant reduction of the violation rate for most of the cases this observation can be regarded as supporting evidence for expected utility plus error term the common consequence effect and the common ratio effect both introduced by allais 1953 are the most prominent and most investigated violations of expected utility eu they have motivated the development of alternative theories of choice under risk which are able to accommodate the observed behavioural patterns nowadays a large number of alternative theories exist see starmer 2000 sugden 2004 and schmidt 2004 for surveys and naturally the question arises which theory can explain observed behaviour best many studies have addressed this question most prominent seem to be those of harless and camerer 1994 and hey and orme 1994 since eu and its alternatives are deterministic theories but observed choices are stochastic both papers integrated an error term into their estimations this fact has aroused interest in a general discussion of the role of errors in decision making under risk the discussion can be disentangled into two issues the first issue concerns the modelling of the stochastic component harless and camerer 1994 hey and orme 1994 camerer and ho 1994 hey 1995 loomes and sugden 1995 and corresponding experimental tests carbone 1997 ballinger and wilcox 1997 loomes and sugden 1998 carbone and hey 2000 buschena and zilberman 2000 loomes et al 2002 the second issue concerns the performance of eu and its alternatives for given specifications of the error term in this context hey 1995 building upon the results of hey and orme 1994 arrives at the following conclusion