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

该博士论文进修奖允许该研究生在中国中部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体走势，以及个人关于每日收益和损失以及当前情绪状态的自我报告。研究者将使用投资组合选择实验来研究建议、歧义厌恶、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检验这些关系，因为他们的情绪自然会受到股票市场每天波动的影响。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棱两可的事件。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角度来看。它们代表了迄今为止尚未被利用的实验数据的独特来源。这个项目考察投资者对建议的反应，因为投资决策很少是在真空中做出的。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4000万的股票投资者中，大多数是自己交易股票的小规模个人股东。这些潜在的发现将使我们更好地理解人们在情绪唤起的模糊情况下是如何思考和行为的。该项目通过观察投资者情绪状态的变化，以及他们是否能获得建议，来探讨投资者在什么情况下更有可能表现出对模糊性的厌恶。该项目还确定了在情绪激动的代理人中是否存在对模糊性的异质反应。我们也许能给新理论一些启发。如果本研究发现情绪对个体歧义厌恶有系统的影响，则表明歧义厌恶应该被建模为状态依赖。预期更广泛的影响：歧义厌恶已被证明在解释股票溢价之谜和母国偏见等异常现象方面是有用的。这些现象在中国股市中也可能存在。许多股票的交易价格低于其标的资产的价值，投资者倾向于只投资于他们更熟悉的公司的股票。本研究将提供证据，帮助验证这些行为偏差或困惑在中国股票市场。这些发现可能为中国教育个人投资者提供了明确的途径。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，但研究者希望将他们的行为推断到其他地方的个人投资者，他们必须在金融领域做出重要的个人决定。在美国和世界各地，个人正面临越来越多的财务决策。例如，公司现在经常在他们的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感兴趣的是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.