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Showing posts with label allais paradox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label allais paradox. Show all posts

Wednesday, 24 March 2010

Investor Decisions – Experience is Not Enough

Economic Paradoxes

At the heart of Prospect Theory, the seminal approach behind behavioural finance, lies a puzzling paradox. Although the theory argues that people overweight the chances of unlikely events occurring – so, of instance, we worry much more than we ought to that our children will be kidnapped – the evidence from the field suggests exactly the opposite.

So, it seems we have a dilemma at the centre of the behavioural universe. Either way traditional economics gets it wrong but so, it seems, does the newfangled psychological kind. Given that we start the analysis with only three choices – that people correctly weight rare events, underweight them or overweight them – then it’s a bit disappointing that the two main branches of economics manage to slightly miss the correct answer.

That’s “slightly” in the sense of “completely and utterly”, of course.