Individuals Investment in Financial Structured Products from Rational and Behavioral Choice Perspectives

Moran Ofir and Zvi Wiener

Chapter 2 in Behavioral Finance:Where Do Investors' Biases Come From?, 2016, pp 33-65 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Structured products (SP) are synthetic investment instruments specially designed to meet specific needs that cannot be met by acquiring standard financial instruments available in the markets. We argue that many SP currently available to retail investors are designed to exploit several behavioral biases including: loss aversion, the disposition effects, herd behavior, the ostrich effect and the hindsight bias. We perform an experiment that examines investor decision-making in relation to SP investments. Our findings demonstrate that investors tend to be affected by th se behavioral biases, which favor SP investments. Accordingly, regulation dealing specifically with SP may be warranted to improve investor protection. We offer a regulation that would compel issuers to reveal the effective fees they charge investors. In disclosing the effective fees, investors will be able to improve their decisions and will be able to evaluate the costs of their behavioral biases.

Keywords: Behavioral Finance; Rationality; Experimental Finance; Reference Points; Professionals; Gender; Culture and Finance; Equity Premium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789813100091_0002 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789813100091_0002 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

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:wsi:wschap:9789813100091_0002

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().