Mullainathan et al [Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2008] present a model of coarse thinking or analogy based thinking. The essential idea behind coarse thinking is that people put situations into categories and the values assigned to attributes in a given situation are affected by the values of corresponding attributes in other co-categorized situations. We test this hypothesis in an experiment on financial options against the benchmark of arbitrage-free pricing. Firstly, we test whether a financial option is priced in analogy with its underlying stock (transference). Secondly, we test for whether variations in the analogy between a financial option and its underlying stock matter (framing). We find evidence in support of both transference and framing.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
13515.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Sendhil Mullainathan & Joshua Schwartzstein & Andrei Shleifer, 2006.
"Coarse Thinking and Persuasion,"
NBER Working Papers
12720, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)