Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement: An Expermental Study of Ambiguity Aversion, Advice, and Emotion Among Small-Scale Stockholders in China

这个博士论文改进奖允许研究生在华中武汉的股票交易大厅进行一系列准现场实验。调查人员计划记录股票市场的每日总波动和个人对每日收益和损失以及当前情绪状态的自我报告。 研究者将使用一个投资组合选择实验来研究建议、模糊厌恶、投资者诱导情绪与投资行为之间的关系。 研究者将通过研究中国的小股东来研究这些关系，因为他们的情绪是由股票市场的日常波动自然诱发的。这些投资者已经花了好几年的时间交易股票，他们每天都在处理可能引发情绪反应的模糊事件。对这一群体的研究是非常可行的，无论是从访问当地交易室的大量投资者的角度，还是从成本的角度。它们代表了迄今为止尚未被利用的实验数据的独特来源。 本项目研究投资者对建议的反应，因为投资决策很少在真空中做出。人们可能会咨询朋友、家人和邻居--这些人可能并不比投资者自己更了解情况。然而，他们的观点可能是有影响力的。在中国，大约4000万股票投资者中，大多数是自己交易股票的小规模个人股票持有者。潜在的研究结果将使我们更好地了解人们在情绪激动的模糊情况下的实际想法和行为。 该项目通过观察投资者情绪状态的变化以及他们是否能够获得建议，来探索在什么情况下投资者更有可能表现出模糊厌恶。 该项目还确定是否有情绪化的代理人之间的歧义的异质反应。我们也许能给新理论一些启发。如果这项研究发现，情绪对个人的模糊厌恶有系统的影响，这将表明，模糊厌恶应建模为状态dependent.Expected更广泛的影响：模糊厌恶已被证明是有用的解释异常，如股权溢价之谜和母国偏见。这些现象在中国股票市场上也可能存在。许多股票的交易价格低于其标的资产的价值，投资者往往只投资于他们更熟悉的公司的股票。 本研究将为验证中国股票市场中的这些行为偏差或困惑提供证据。 调查结果可能会明确中国如何教育其个人投资者。此外，随着中国金融市场的逐步开放，这也可能有助于国际投资者了解中国投资者的行为。虽然这些实验是基于中国的个人投资者，但研究人员希望将他们的行为推断到其他地方的个人投资者身上，这些个人投资者必须在金融方面做出重要的个人决定。在美国和世界各地，个人面临越来越多的财务决策。例如，公司现在经常在其薪酬计划中包括限制性股票或股票期权。更广泛地说，发展经济学家和政策制定者有兴趣了解是什么阻碍了家庭进行可能有利可图的投资。

This doctoral dissertation improvement award permits the graduate student to run a series of quasi-field experiments on the stock trading floors in Wuhan in Central China. The investigator plans to record both aggregate daily movements in the stock market and individual self-reports of both daily gains and losses and current emotional states. The investigator will use a portfolio choice experiment to study the relationships between advice, ambiguity aversion, the investors' induced emotions and their investment behavior. The investigator will examine these relationships by studying small-scale stockholders in China because their emotions are naturally induced by day to day fluctuations in the stock market. These investors have spent quite a few years trading stocks and they deal with ambiguous events that may trigger emotional responses on a potentially daily basis. Research on this group is very feasible both in terms of access to a large population of investors that visit the local trading rooms and also in terms of cost. They represent a unique source for experimental data that has not been exploited up to this point. This project examines investor reactions to advice since investment decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. People may consult friends, family and neighbors - individuals that may not be any more informed than the investors themselves. Nevertheless theiropinions may be influential. In China, among the roughly 40 million stock investors, most are small-scale individual stock holders who trade stocks by themselves.The potential findings will lead us to a greater understanding of how people actually think and behave in ambiguous situations with emotional arousal. The project explores in what situations investors are more likely to exhibit ambiguity aversion by looking at variations in their emotional states and whether or not they have access to advice. The project also determines if there are heterogeneous responses to ambiguity among emotionally charged agents. We may be able to give some inspiration for new theories. If this study finds that emotions have a systematic effect on an individual's ambiguity aversion, it would suggest that ambiguity aversion should be modeled as state dependent.Expected Broader Impact: Ambiguity aversion has been shown to be useful in explaining anomalies such as the equity premium puzzle and the home country bias. These phenomena may also exist in the Chinese stock markets. Many stocks are traded at prices lower than the value of their underlying assets, and investors tend to invest only in stocks of the companies that they are more familiar to them. This study will provide evidence to help verify these behavioral biases or puzzles in the Chinese stock market. The findings may make clear ways in which China could educate its individual investors. Also as the Chinese financial market gradually opens up, it might also help international investors understand the behavior of Chinese investors.Although these experiments are based on individual investors in China, the investigator hopes to extrapolatetheir behavior to individual investors elsewhere who have to make important personal decisions in finance. In the United States and around the world, individuals are facing more and more financial decisions. For example, companies are now often including restricted stocks or stock options in their compensation plans. Even more broadly, development economists and policy makers are interested in understanding what may hold back households from making possibly profitable investments.