The disposition effect: who and when?

Carlos Cueva, Inigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe, Giovanni Ponti () and Josefa Tomás Lucas ()
Additional contact information
Josefa Tomás Lucas: Universidad de Alicante

Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie)

Abstract: The disposition effect (DE) is a common investment bias consisting of the tendency to sell profitable assets and hold losing assets. We investigate individual determinants of the DE in a standard experimental environment as well as one with transaction costs and one with a competitive payment scheme. Overall DE is positive and significant in all trading environments. In line with previous results in the literature, we find that women are more reluctant to sell losing assets than men in the standard environment. However, this difference disappears in the presence of transaction costs. Contrary to earlier reports, we do not find a significant gender difference in the DE in any environment. Novelly, we find that the most significant psychological predictor of the reluctance to realize losses is the difficulty in recognizing one’s errors. This constitutes novel direct evidence that “investors are also reluctant to accept and realize losses because the very act of doing so proves that their first judgment was wrong” (Gross, 1982, p. 150).

Keywords: Behavioral Finance; Experimental Economics; Disposition effect; Transaction costs; Gender differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D70 D81 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published by Ivie

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ivie.es/downloads/docs/wpasad/wpasad-2016-01.pdf Fisrt version / Primera version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ivi:wpasad:2016-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Departamento de Edición ().