Cognitive Biases, Ambiguity Aversion and Asset Pricing in Financial Markets

Elena Asparouhova, Peter Bossaerts, Jon Eguia and William Zame
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Elena Asparouhova: University of Utah
Peter Bossaerts: Caltech, EPFL Lausanne and CEPR

No 09-20, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: Agents with cognitive limitations may compute the expected value of a risky asset incorrectly. If market prices reflect the probabilities of the payoff-relevant states, agents who compute the probabilities incorrectly encounter a market price that is inconsistent with their calculation. We test whether observing the market price makes agents lose confidence in their own calculations. We hypothesize that agents who lose confidence in their own calculations seek to avoid the uncertainty by acquiring a portfolio that generates a sure return. They then become price insensitive: they do not adjust their portfolio with changes in relative prices, and therefore they do not affect prices. We identify price insensitive agents in an experiment, and we test three implications of our hypothesis: (i) price quality is inversely related to the proportion of price-insensitive agents; (ii) price-insensitive subjects hold more balanced portfolios, and (iii) price-insensitive subjects trade less. Our experiments strongly confirm the first two hypotheses and provide some evidence in support of the third, reinforcing our view that market prices trigger ambiguity averse decisions.

Keywords: Asset pricing; ambiguity aversion; cognitive bias; Bayesian updating; market experiments. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 G12 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2009-05
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp0920

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