Formulation Effect

O Formulation Effect diz respeito a influência do forma de apresentação das informações sobre a decisão das pessoas. O termo tem sido pesquisado em finanças comportamentais e recentemente um orientando defendeu sua dissertação sobre o assunto. Um extrato do trabalho foi apresentado no Enanpad de 2007:

Formulation Effect: Influência da Forma de Apresentação sobre o Processo Decisório de Usuários de Informações Financeiras

Este trabalho tem como principal objetivo verificar se a forma como os demonstrativos e relatórios contábeis é apresentada pode (ou não) influenciar as decisões dos usuários de informações financeiras, tendo como base as respostas de 1.850 discentes dos cursos de Administração e Contábeis de instituições públicas e particulares. Foram realizados seis experimentos, apresentados sob forma de questionário, estruturados em dois estudos. No Estudo I, composto pelos experimentos 1, 2 e 6, o objetivo foi verificar se os diferentes tratamentos contábeis para avaliação e evidenciação de alguns elementos afetam, de forma significante, as decisões. O Estudo II, composto dos experimentos 3, 4 e 5, buscou verificar se a utilização de recursos textuais e/ou gráficos na apresentação de informações financeiras pode alterar a percepção e, conseqüente, decisão dos indivíduos. Os resultados dos estudos evidenciam que os participantes da pesquisa tiveram suas escolhas influenciadas pelo critério de avaliação de estoques e evidenciação de P&D utilizados e pelo reconhecimento dos efeitos da inflação na elaboração das demonstrações contábeis, bem como pela utilização de recursos textuais e/ou gráficos na apresentação dos relatórios financeiros, comprovando o efeito formulação em cinco das seis situações apresentadas.

A Falácia do Planejamento

A falácia do planejamento procura explicar a razão dos atrasos em obras públicas, em tarefas pessoais, etc. Um link faz um levantamento interessante sobre obras e situações onde ocorre esta falácia:

=> O aeroporto de Denver foi inaugurado 16 meses depois, a um custo de 2 bilhões

=> A Opera de Sidnei, Austrália, estava prevista para se inaugurada em 1963 por 7 milhões. Foi completada em 1973, por 102 milhões

Um estudo interessante, de Buehler et. al. (1995), questionou aos estudantes qual a previsão para completar um trabalho acadêmico. A maioria errou sua previsão.

Uma possível justificativa para este problema talvez seja a idéia das pessoas substituirem o "cenário possível" pelo "melhor cenário" no planejamento.

Outra pesquisa, de Buehler et. al. (2002), estudou os estudantes japoneses e perguntou quanto tempo esperavam finalizar um trabalho. A média da resposta foi 10 dias antes da data final. O valor real: 1 dia.

Outra experiência fez uma pergunta sobre a data da compra dos presentes de natal. O resultado foi basicamente o mesmo.

Acabou a história de que "brasileira deixa tudo para o último dia". Agora é "a falácia do planejamento".

Referências

Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. 1994. Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67: 366-381.

Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. 1995. It's about time: Optimistic predictions in work and love. Pp. 1-32 in European Review of Social Psychology, Volume 6, eds. W. Stroebe and M. Hewstone. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. 2002. Inside the planning fallacy: The causes and consequences of optimistic time predictions. Pp. 250-270 in Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. and Kahneman, D. (eds.) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Newby-Clark, I. R., Ross, M., Buehler, R., Koehler, D. J. and Griffin, D. 2000. People focus on optimistic and disregard pessimistic scenarios while predicting their task completion times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6: 171-182.

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

Limites das Finanças Comportamentais e da Neuroeconomia

O blog Traderfeed apresenta um artigo interessante sobre os limites das Finanças Comportamentais e da Neuroeconomia. A dificuldade de ter uma validação no mundo real (o autor afirma que não encontrou estudos onde os investigadores observam os traders agindo no mundo real) e uma abordagem simplista do processo decisório são considerações feitas. Apesar de serem questionáveis, acredito que possam ser interessantes para reflexão:

The Limits of Behavioral Finance and Neuroeconomics
The field of behavioral finance, which studies how subjective elements introduce distortions in decision-making (and presumably inefficiencies in markets), has been successful in broadening ideas in finance based upon assumptions of investor rationality. More recently, the boom in cognitive neuroscience and wider access to imaging has led to a study of brain processes during financial decisions. Variously termed neurofinance and neuroeconomics, these studies have literally enabled us to get inside our own heads to see what happens under conditions of risk and reward.

Two excellent books have recently hit the market to integrate findings within behavioral finance and neuroeconomics. Both are worthy additions to a trader's bookshelf; after reading them, one cannot help but be impressed with the complexity of decision-making and the ways in which we can stray from rationality. For myself as a psychologist and trader, both books also brought more clearly into focus the limitations of these two fields of study.

Inside the Investor's Brain by Richard Peterson is written primarily for an audience of traders and investors. It is well grounded in research and summarizes a variety of themes in the literature, including how emotions affect judgments and various thought-traps that influence financial decisions. He explores the relationship between gambling and financial decision making, illustrating how we typically respond to risk. He also takes a look at how personality shapes our decisions, including the influence of overconfidence, anxiety, and herding. A final section explores techniques for emotion management and several change techniques. The book is very well written and organized.

Your Money and Your Brain by Jason Zweig is aimed more toward a popular reading audience. It is written in an engaging, easy-to-read style, moving swiftly from research studies to everyday examples of skewed decision-making and behavior and back again. Focused more on neuroeconomics than the broad sweep of behavioral finance, the book is organized by emotional themes: greed, confidence, risk, fear, surprise, regret, and happiness. The author effectively illustrates his points, bringing life and human interest to what could be dry laboratory research.

Having surveyed the fields through these two volumes, I cannot help but notice several limits to our current understanding:

1) The Pendulum Has Swung Too Far - The studies emphasize how we depart from rationality, but don't really explain how it is that we do manage to cope in most challenging life situations. Particularly missing are sophisticated accounts of how reflective reason and reflexive emotion work in concert to help us navigate the world successfully. (Damasio's work, for instance, doesn't figure prominently in these accounts, and the large psychological literature on emotion and coping is almost completely absent). As a result, we seem to have gone from a model of investor rationality to one of investor irrationality. But markets *are* efficient, if not perfectly so, and a thorough account of investor and trader behavior needs to account for that fact.

2) Absence of Real-World Validation - For such a large literature, it is noteworthy that so few studies have been conducted with actual traders in actual trading situations. Either the studies create laboratory decision-making tasks or rely on animal models of choice under various conditions. Interestingly, I can't find any studies where the investigators have simply observed traders in the act of trading and interviewed them about their experience or measured their emotional/physiological response patterns. It's all a bit like studying creativity without observing and talking with artists. As a result, some of the conclusions of the research don't ring true to trading life. For instance, there is a presumption that emotions interfere with good decision-making and need, somehow, to be managed. That fails to account for the important ways in which successful traders and investors do manage to profit from their "feel" for markets.

3) Simplistic Portrayal of the Process of Decision Making - Just about every discussion I run into conflates physiological arousal and subjective emotional experience. The two are not the same, and the relationship between the two is an important mediator of coping and performance. At times intuition is described as a function of the body; at times it is equated with emotional feelings. Howard Gardner's important work on multiple intelligences makes room for "bodily-kinesthetic" knowing: the kind of expertise demonstrated by, say, a mime or a dancer. This is different both from reflective/analytic thought and from emotional awareness. That has yet to be integrated into the literatures of neuroeconomics and behavioral finance.

A little while ago, I announced a trader coaching project in which I offered a month of free coaching to a trader in return for the right to post the process to the blog. That work with the trader I called Trader C went well and leads me to consider extending the project. One way of doing so would be to offer free coaching to traders willing to participate in interviews and biofeedback measurement regarding their decision-making experience. Such a project extension would bring needed real-world perspective to a growing and promising literature.

Markowitz e o homem econômico

Uma história interessante envolvendo Markowitz, famoso economista responsável pelo desenvolvimento da teoria de carteiras e que contribuiu com a criação de instrumentos de análise de investimento. Quando trabalhava na Rand Corporation , Markowitz tentava determinar como alocar seus recursos de aposentadoria. Pela sua teoria, o processo é fácil: calcular a co-variância histórica dos diferentes tipos de ativos e achar a fronteira eficiente. Mas, após refletir sobre o assunto, Markowitz decidiu aplicar metade em ações e metade de títulos (bonds).

"Mr. Markowitz had proved “incapable of applying” his breakthrough theory to his own money. Economists in his day believed powerfully in the concept of “economic man”— the theory that people always acted in their own best self-interest. Yet Mr. Markowitz, famous economist though he was, was clearly not an example of economic man."