Adriana Breaban

We consider the relationship between trader emotions and asset market behavior. We create experimental asset markets with the structure first studied by Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988), which is known to generate price bubbles and crashes. To track traders’ emotions in real time, we analyze participants’ facial expressions with facereading software before and while the market is operating. We find that a positive emotional state correlates with purchases and overpricing. Fear correlates with selling, low prices, and price decreases. The experiment confirms the intuition that emotions and market dynamics are closely related.

We report an experiment to consider the emotional correlates of prudent decision making. In the experiment, we present subjects with lotteries and measure their emotional response with facial recognition software. They then make binary choices between risky lotteries that distinguish prudent from imprudent individuals. They also perform tasks to measure their cognitive ability and a number of personality characteristics. We find that a more negative emotional state correlates with greater prudence. Higher cognitive ability and less conscientiousness is also associated with greater prudence.

In this experiment, structured funds are sequentially offered to investors as an alternative to bonds. Our results show that the order in which information is presented generates significant biases in decision‐making. These biases can have both positive and negative consequences on investors' financial behaviour. In fact, when the investment alternatives are made easier to compare, ‘too good to be true’ offers are more easily spotted. Simultaneously, when funds' expected performance shows an apparently positive trend, funds are more often chosen. The ‘too good to be true’ effect is alleviated by high transparency of the information on the funds return.