I examine the inXuence of the framing of investment portfolios on the risk-taking behavior of individual investors. Investment portfolios can be presented either in aggregated or segregated framing, meaning that either the overall distribution or the single investments of portfolios are displayed. Previous studies have found that simple lottery portfolios are more attractive if their overall di...

This paper tests whether information advantages help explain why some individual investors concentrate their stock portfolios in a few stocks. Slock investments made by households that choose lo concentrate their brokerage accounts in a few stocks outperform those made by households with more diversified accounts (especially among those with large portfolios). Excess returns of concentrated rel...

Combining survey responses and trading records of clients of a German retail broker, this paper examines some of the causes for the apparent failure to buy and hold a well-diversified portfolio. The subjective investor attributes gleaned from the survey help explain the variation in actual portfolio and trading choices. Self-reported risk aversion is the single most important determinant of bot...

This paper investigates the performance of efficient portfolios in a financial market with heterogeneous investors including rational traders, noise traders, and chartists. A generalization of the security market line result states that, regardless of the diversity of beliefs, the portfolios of rational investors with mean-variance preferences are mean-variance efficient in the sense of classic...

The levels of diversification in U.S. investors’ equity portfolios present a puzzle. Today’s optimal level of diversification, measured by the rules of mean–variance portfolio theory, exceeds 300 stocks, but the average investor holds only 3 or 4 stocks. The diversification puzzle can be solved, however, in the context of behavioral portfolio theory. In behavioral portfolio theory, investors co...

This research extends agency theory by exploring the influence of varied, competing, principal interests on executive actions. Findings reveal that ownership of a firm by dedicated institutional investors, who hold concentrated portfolios over time, is positively associated with firm use of strategic competitive actions. Ownership by transient institutional investors, who hold broad portfolios ...

Abstract How should long-term investors form portfolios in our time-varying, multi-factor and friction-filled world? Two conceptual frameworks may help: first, look directly at the stream of payments that a portfolio payout policy can produce. Second, include general equilibrium view markets’ economic purpose, nature investors’ different preferences, risk-taking ability, function equilibrium. T...