IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-01400243.html

Risk Attitude, Beliefs Updating, and the Information Content of Trades: An Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Christophe Bisière

    (TSM - Toulouse School of Management Research - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - TSM - Toulouse School of Management - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse)

  • Jean-Paul Décamps

    (LBNC - Laboratoire Biens, Normes, Contrats - AU - Avignon Université, TSM - Toulouse School of Management Research - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - TSM - Toulouse School of Management - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse)

  • Stefano Lovo

    (GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

We conduct a series of experiments that simulate trading in financial markets. We find that the information content of the order flow varies with the strength of subjects' prior beliefs about fundamentals. The presence of intrinsic uncertainty about the asset's fundamentals reduces informational efficiency. This originates from subjects' risk attitudes and biases in the way some subjects update their beliefs. The behavior of approximately 63% of the subjects is consistent with the expected utility maximization. These subjects are either risk averse (52%) or risk loving (11%). About 22% of the subjects display non-Bayesian updating of beliefs: underconfidence emerges for weak prior beliefs, and confirmation bias occurs for strong prior beliefs. Non-Bayesian belief updating reduces market efficiency when subjects' prior beliefs are weak and increases it when the prior beliefs are strong.

Suggested Citation

  • Christophe Bisière & Jean-Paul Décamps & Stefano Lovo, 2015. "Risk Attitude, Beliefs Updating, and the Information Content of Trades: An Experiment," Post-Print halshs-01400243, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01400243
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2013.1886
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Choijil, Enkhbayar & Méndez, Christian Espinosa & Wong, Wing-Keung & Vieito, João Paulo & Batmunkh, Munkh-Ulzii, 2022. "Thirty years of herd behavior in financial markets: A bibliometric analysis," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).
    2. le Roux, Sara & Bopp, Fabian, 2025. "Social learning under ambiguity—An experimental study," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    3. Charness, Gary & Dave, Chetan, 2017. "Confirmation bias with motivated beliefs," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 1-23.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01400243. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.