【正文】 confirmed the effect using investors. Frino et al. take extreme care with their empirical approach and confirm the existence of the house–money effect. They also find that morning winners who seek excessive risks in the afternoon end up being the biggest afternoon losers.Oh et al. (2008this issue) pare the performance of investors in Korea who trade stocks online and those who do not. Despite the extensive availability of online investing, very little research has been conducted on this topic (one notable exception is Barber and Odean, 2002). Oh et al. identify investor types (domestic institutional investors, foreign investors, and individual investors) and their method of trade (online vs. nononline). The best and worse performers were foreign investors and individual investors, respectively, regardless of whether they were trading online. However, individuals who traded online appear to be the worse performers. Oh et al. suggest that the trading venue must be considered when paring the relative performance of different investor types. In general, their findings are consistent with the hypothesized expectations of online trading performance. Specifically, individual investors39。s (1985) paper was met with considerable skepticism (Thaler, 1999). More recently, many good theoretical models have explored the ramifications of lessthanrational agents. Initially, studies focused on asset pricing, but in recent years, models have incorporated the effect that lessthanrational managers may have on corporate finance decision making. Barberis and Thaler (2003) provide an excellent literature review of the many different types of behavioral biases that financial decision makers might hold and how these biases might affect decision making and, in turn, the financial markets.Empirical papers on behavioral finance also had a slow start—primarily because arguments based on stocklevel data suffer from the jointtest problem (market efficiency and asset pricing model) and were, thus, less convincing to an initially skeptical audience. Terrence Odean overcame this limitation by obtaining individual brokerage account data. In a series of papers (many with Brad Barber), he showed that individual investors suffered from several behavioral biases. Many other researchers and data sets have since empirically tested behavioral finance theories. Hirshleifer (2001) provides an excellent literature review of the empirical evidence in behavioral finance with regard to asset pricing. Somewhat surprisingly, however, few researchers have yet to use experiments to test behavioral finance theories, even though welldesigned experiments allow researchers to control the environment.Asia is an interesting place to study behavioral finance because of the different levels of capitalism and financial market experience of its participants. Countries such as China have been slowly changing over the last couple of decades to a capitalistic economy from a socialistic one. On the other hand, countries such as Japan have had large economic and financial markets for a much longer time. Thus, because variations in knowledge and experience likely play a role in explaining variations in economic decision making, Asia is fertile ground for the study of behavioral finance.Also, there is a reason to believe that Asians in general suffer from cognitive biases more than do people of Western cultures. Anecdotally, individual investors in Asia are often viewed as mere gamblers. Theoretically, social scientists and psychologists have contended that culture can nurture tendencies toward behavioral biases at varying levels (., Yates et al., 1989). According to Hofstede (1980), differences among cultures can be expressed on an individualism–collectivism continuum. Asian cultures tend to be based on a socially collective paradigm. It has been argued that collectiveoriented societies can cause individuals to be overconfident, which is a behavioral bias. Because behavioral inclinations can be learned (Wolosin et al., 1973), cultural differences in life experiences and education may cause differences in behavior. Life experiences and education are certainly different among different cultures. To this end, some evidence exists that suggests that people raised in Asian cultures exhibit more behavioral biases than people from the United States (., Yates et al., 1997).Although the psychology literature suggests that people of Asian cultures may suffer more from behavioral biases than people of Western cultures, the literature is still sparse. Weber and Hsee (2000) noted: “The bottom line is that the topic of culture and decision making has not received a lot of attention from either decision researchers or crosscultural psychologists” (p. 34). Chen et al. (in press) provide a useful literature review from the psychology and finance literatures on the behavior of Asian people and how these behaviors might affect their investment decision making. In support of the notion that Asians suffer from behavioral biases more than people from Western cultures, they find that individual investors in China suffer more from both an overconfidence bias and the disposition effect than . individual investors.Overall, behavioral finance may still be characterized as a controversial topic, but it is much less so than it once was. We now have a better understanding of how humans behave, and many researchers now accept that these behavioral inclinations can affect financial decision making. And, it is now widely accepted that there are limits to arbitrage (Shleifer and Vishny, 1997), so these behaviors may impact prices. While recent research on behavioral finance has significantly advanced our understanding of financial markets, the future looks even more promising. At finance conferences, sessions on behavioral finance are very well attended, and the audience members are often the younger scholars of the academic profession.Thaler (1999) had a wish l