Dear Colleagues,

The last several decades have seen an explosion of interest in behavioral economics. Two Nobel prizes in economic sciences awarded on the topic signify the growing maturity of the field and its increasing importance. Behavioral economics, and its close cousin behavioral finance, highlight the failures of rational models.

This is in contrast to classical finance which focuses on fully rational, unemotional agents. The accumulation of stock market and individual decision-making anomalies strongly contradict the classical view of rationality.

Controversy still surrounds the field, however, in spite of evidence of market failures and behavioral puzzles. The controversy is in part due to concerns over data mining and in part due to the plausibility of behavioral hypotheses, such as individual sentiment driving market-wide price movements.

This special issue is intended to examine psychological factors known to influence individual choice and explore the impact this has on financial markets. Among the general topics to be considered are:

1. Psychological underpinnings: emotion and willingness to take risk, ambiguity aversion, etc.
2. Emotions and markets: SAD effect, sentiment, etc.
3. Heuristics and biases: home bias, anchoring, etc.
4. Social forces: selfishness, altruism, herding, bubbles, etc.
5. Capital markets efficiency: market anomalies, including momentum, reversals, the January effect, etc.
6. Corporate finance: catering, capital budgeting anomalies, overconfident managers, etc.
7. Data mining: applications of the White Reality Test, out-of-sample validation, etc.

Professor Mark Kamstra
Guest Editor

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