Behavioral Finance and Financial Management

Dear Colleagues,

In an era of rapid technological innovation and economic uncertainty, traditional finance theories often fail to capture the complexities of human behavior. Behavioral finance has emerged as a powerful lens and profoundly reshaped our understanding of biases, emotions, and cognitive limitations in financial decision-making. This paradigm highlights the importance of psychological and cognitive factors in shaping financial outcomes and challenges the traditional assumptions of rationality and market efficiency.

Likewise, financial management practices must evolve to incorporate behavioral insights to enhance decision-making processes, strategic planning, and risk assessment. This Special Issue of JRFM attempts to advance our understanding of how behavioral factors shape financial outcomes for individuals, institutions, and markets. By aligning behavioral insights with financial management practices, this Special Issue is aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice, fostering innovative discussions on the intersection of behavioral finance and financial management.

We invite submissions on innovative approaches to behavioral finance and financial management, particularly those integrating psychological and cognitive factors into traditional financial models while remaining consistent with robust empirical findings. We strongly encourage submissions that bridge the gap between behavioral theories and practical financial decision-making, addressing fundamental questions of investor behavior, market efficiency, and firm-level financial strategies.

We welcome articles that explore the critical divide between traditional rational finance and behavioral finance, a divide highlighted in Richard Thaler’s seminal work, Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice (1980): “Traditional finance assumes that people make decisions based on objective rationality, while behavioral finance explores the reality that choices often deviate due to cognitive biases and heuristics.”

The key question is not whether individuals or markets deviate from rational expectations, but rather to what extent, under what conditions, and why such deviations occur. We encourage bold and potentially controversial papers proposing innovative behavioral finance models or frameworks that extend beyond the confines of traditional rational agent theory while offering insights that can inform practical financial management. We are in search of a unifying behavioral finance and financial management framework—an overarching framework that integrates the interplay of psychological influences, market dynamics, and corporate decision-making into a cohesive narrative—advancing both academic inquiry and practical application.

Dr. Muhammad Arslan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Risk and Financial Management is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cognitive biases and financial management
• behavioral corporate finance
• emotions and heuristics in corporate financial decisions and portfolio management
• behavioral insights in financial technology
• market anomalies and behavioral perspectives
• investment behavior
• risk management