抄録
We conduct a novel virtual stock market experiment that aims to investigate the motives behind short-term investment behavior at the individual decision-making level. In particular, we focus on individual investors trading strategies in response to public information —about prices, macroeconomic news, and relevant individual-stock information. The distinguishing feature of our experiment is the use of factual contemporaneous news items directly related to the stocks in subjects’ portfolios. We were able to obtain a few interesteing information-related results: (i) more information leads to more frequent trading; (ii) while shorter trading horizon results in more orders and in more overall information usage, the average amount of information used per decision does not differ with horizon length; (iii) majority of trading is of the positive-feedback type —following individual stock prices and the market as a whole; (iv) the shorter the trading horizon, the more pronounced is the positive-feedback effect. We also examined the motives behind specific buying and selling decisions: our subjects’ investment decisions are driven largely by psychological motives; in particular, regret aversion is a habitually common reason for trading and for not trading —through the disposition effect.
