Financial Decision Making Understanding Chinese Investment Behavior

This book sheds light on financial decision making and lays down the major biases in human behavioral decision making, such as over-confidence, naive extrapolation, attention, and risk aversion, and how they lead investors and corporations to make considerable mistakes in investment.

It draws on a large body of literature, from psychology and social psychology to, most importantly, behavioral economics and behavioral finance. It also looks at the progress in behavioral finance research over recent decades and includes research outputs based on retail and institutional investors from the United States, China, and many other international financial markets.

The book focuses on China?s financial reforms and economic transition and includes many cases from that country to highlight the importance of behavioral finance and investor education. It therefore provides much needed in-depth understanding of the Chinese capital market.

1 Disappointing performance

2 Unsettled investors

3 Under-diversified portfolios

4 Mistimed timing and misguided stock picking

5 Disappointing mutual fund performance

6 Irrational mind

7 Behavioral biases and investment decision making

8 Difficult history

9 Learning by investing

10 Over-confident CEOs

11 Catering CEOs

12 Risk management! Risk management!

13 Regulation and government decision making: the behavioral biases of governments and regulators

14 How to reform

Ning Zhu is a Deputy Director at the National Institute of Financial Research and FanHai Professor of Finance at the PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, Professor of Finance at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Faculty Fellow at the Yale University International Center for Finance, and Special Term Professor of Finance at the University of California, Davis, and at Guanghua School of Management at Beijing University. Prior to returning to Asia, he was a tenured Professor of Finance at the University of California. Professor Zhu is an expert on behavioral finance, investments, corporate finance, and the Asian financial markets. He has published numerous articles in leading journals in the finance, economics, management, and legal fields. In addition to his academic research, Professor Zhu helps asset management companies in a wide range of capacities.