World Scientific Publishing Company Behavioral Finance: The Coming Of Age

The area of behavioral finance, though relatively young, has matured and spread beyond its initial objectives: to demonstrate the fallibility of the efficient market hypothesis, to shake the belief in the ubiquity of rational decision making, and to convince the finance world of the importance of psychological biases in decision making. The success of the field in meeting its goals, however, has called into question its continued relevance. Behavioral finance is thus currently at a crossroads, and researchers need to decide which way they should turn for the area to continue to thrive and to meaningfully contribute to financial knowledge.This collection of papers deals with rarely-explored topics to point at new directions that behavioral finance should explore to maintain its viability, along with contributions to traditional topics. Some of these topics include innovations, the psychology of policy-makers, biases of peer-to-peer market participants, the behavior and motivation behind corporate social responsibility, and the design of exchanges. Additionally, well-known topics such as the disposition effect, slow and fast decisions and the availability heuristic are revisited, and surprising new findings are presented.By opening the field to novel avenues of discussion, this book addresses the future of behavioral finance and its transition into a new era. About the Author Itzhak Venezia is a Professor of Finance at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and the Chairman of the MBA program and of the Finance Area for MBA studies. He holds the Sanger Chair of Banking and Risk Management (Emeritus) at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel where he taught prior to assuming his current position.Professor Venezia is the editor-in-chief of the World Scientific Lecture Notes in Finance series, and the editor of the book Behavioral Finance: Where do Investors' Biases Come From? He also authored the book Lecture Notes in Behavioral Finance. Professor Venezia has published numerous papers in leading journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Banking and Finance, Management Science, and is the joint editor of the book Bridging the GAAP: Recent Advances in Accounting and Finance.He has taught as a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University. Professor Venezia's research currently concentrates on Behavioral Finance, where he contributes profoundly to the better understanding of the disposition effect, herding, the differences in biases between amateurs and professionals, and other issues. Professor Venezia holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.