【正文】 o explain many empirical patterns, including stock market bubbles in Japan, Taiwan, and the . 1. Introduction Behavioral finance is the paradigm where financial markets are studied using models that are less narrow than those based on Von NeumannMorgenstern expected utility theory and arbitrage assumptions. Specifically, behavioral finance has two building blocks: cognitive psychology and the limits to arbitrage. Cognitive refers to how people think. There is a huge psychology literature documenting that people make systematic errors in the way that they think: they are overconfident, they put too much weight on recent experience, etc. Their preferences may also create distortions. Behavioral finance uses this body of knowledge, rather than taking the arrogant approach that it should be ignored. Limits to arbitrage refers to predicting in what circumstances arbitrage forces will be effective, and when they won39。t be. Behavioral finance uses models in which some agents are not fully rational, either because of preferences or because of mistaken beliefs. An example of an assumption about preferences is that people are loss averse a $2 gain might make people feel better by as much as a $1 loss makes them feel worse. Mistaken beliefs arise because people are bad Bayesians. Modern finance has as a building block the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH). The EMH argues that petition between investors seeking abnormal profits drives prices to their “correct” value. The EMH does not assume that all investors are rational, but it does assume that markets are rational. The EMH does not assume that markets can foresee the future, but it does assume that markets make unbiased forecasts of the future. In contrast, behavioral finance assumes that, in some circumstances, financial markets are informationally inefficient. 2 Not all misvaluations are caused by psychological biases, however. Some are just due to temporary supply and demand imbalances. For example, the tyranny of indexing can lead to demand shifts that are unrelated to the future cash flows of the firm. When Yahoo was added to the Samp。P. If it is easy to take positions (shorting overvalued stocks or buying undervalued stocks) and these misvaluations are certain to be corrected over a short period, then “arbitrageurs” will take positions and eliminate these mispricings before they bee large. But if it is difficult to take these positions, due to short sales constraints, for instance, or if there is no guarantee that the mispricing will be corrected within a reasonable timeframe, then arbitrage will fail to correct the Indeed, arbitrageurs may even choose to avoid the markets where the mispricing is most severe, because the risks are too great. This is especially true when one is dealing with a large market, such as the Japanese stock market in the late 1980s or the . market for technology stocks in the late 1990s. Arbitrageurs that attempted to short Japanese stocks in mid 1987 and hedge by going long in . stocks were ri