Decisões Racionais

O texto a seguir foi publicado na revista New Yorker . O que a princípio seria um comentário sobre o livro de Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, torna-se um painel muito interessante das finanças comportamentais. Aqui, o endereço de Ariely

What Was I Thinking?
The latest reasoning about our irrational ways.
by Elizabeth Kolbert February 25, 2008

People make bad decisions, but they make them in systematic ways.

A couple of months ago, I went on-line to order a book. The book had a list price of twenty-four dollars; Amazon was offering it for eighteen. I clicked to add it to my “shopping cart” and a message popped up on the screen. “Wait!” it admonished me. “Add $7.00 to your order to qualify for FREE Super Saver Shipping!” I was ordering the book for work; still, I hesitated. I thought about whether there were other books that I might need, or want. I couldn’t think of any, so I got up from my desk, went into the living room, and asked my nine-year-old twins. They wanted a Tintin book. Since they already own a large stack of Tintins, it was hard to find one that they didn’t have. They scrolled through the possibilities. After much discussion, they picked a three-in-one volume containing two adventures they had previously read. I clicked it into the shopping cart and checked out. By the time I was done, I had saved The New Yorker $3.99 in shipping charges. Meanwhile, I had cost myself $12.91.

Why do people do things like this? From the perspective of neoclassical economics, self-punishing decisions are difficult to explain. Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them. Yet actual economic life, as opposed to the theoretical version, is full of miscalculations, from the gallon jar of mayonnaise purchased at spectacular savings to the billions of dollars Americans will spend this year to service their credit-card debt. The real mystery, it could be argued, isn’t why we make so many poor economic choices but why we persist in accepting economic theory.

In “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” (Harper; $25.95), Dan Ariely, a professor at M.I.T., offers a taxonomy of financial folly. His approach is empirical rather than historical or theoretical. In pursuit of his research, Ariely has served beer laced with vinegar, left plates full of dollar bills in dorm refrigerators, and asked undergraduates to fill out surveys while masturbating. He claims that his experiments, and others like them, reveal the underlying logic to our illogic. “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic,” he writes. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.

As an academic discipline, Ariely’s field—behavioral economics—is roughly twenty-five years old. It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Ariely, too, grew up in Israel.) When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called “heuristics.” Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious—people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they’ve recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash—but others were more surprising, even downright wacky. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the United Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects’ responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.

Though Tversky and Kahneman’s research had no direct bearing on economics, its implications for the field were disruptive. Can you really regard people as rational calculators if their decisions are influenced by random numbers? (In 2002, Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize—Tversky had died in 1996—for having “integrated insights from psychology into economics, thereby laying the foundation for a new field of research.”)

Over the years, Tversky and Kahneman’s initial discoveries have been confirmed and extended in dozens of experiments. In one example, Ariely and a colleague asked students at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management to write the last two digits of their Social Security number at the top of a piece of paper. They then told the students to record, on the same paper, whether they would be willing to pay that many dollars for a fancy bottle of wine, a not-so-fancy bottle of wine, a book, or a box of chocolates. Finally, the students were told to write down the maximum figure they would be willing to spend for each item. Once they had finished, Ariely asked them whether they thought that their Social Security numbers had had any influence on their bids. The students dismissed this idea, but when Ariely tabulated the results he found that they were kidding themselves. The students whose Social Security number ended with the lowest figures—00 to 19—were the lowest bidders. For all the items combined, they were willing to offer, on average, sixty-seven dollars. The students in the second-lowest group—20 to 39—were somewhat more free-spending, offering, on average, a hundred and two dollars. The pattern continued up to the highest group—80 to 99—whose members were willing to spend an average of a hundred and ninety-eight dollars, or three times as much as those in the lowest group, for the same items.

This effect is called “anchoring,” and, as Ariely points out, it punches a pretty big hole in microeconomics. When you walk into Starbucks, the prices on the board are supposed to have been determined by the supply of, say, Double Chocolaty Frappuccinos, on the one hand, and the demand for them, on the other. But what if the numbers on the board are influencing your sense of what a Double Chocolaty Frappuccino is worth? In that case, price is not being determined by the interplay of supply and demand; price is, in a sense, determining itself.

Another challenge to standard economic thinking arises from what has become known as the “endowment effect.” To probe this effect, Ariely, who earned one of his two Ph.D.s at Duke, exploited the school’s passion for basketball. Blue Devils fans who had just won tickets to a big game through a lottery were asked the minimum amount that they would accept in exchange for them. Fans who had failed to win tickets through the same lottery were asked the maximum amount that they would be willing to offer for them.

“From a rational perspective, both the ticket holders and the non-ticket holders should have thought of the game in exactly the same way,” Ariely observes. Thus, one might have expected that there would be opportunities for some of the lucky and some of the unlucky to strike deals. But whether or not a lottery entrant had been “endowed” with a ticket turned out to powerfully affect his or her sense of its value. One of the winners Ariely contacted, identified only as Joseph, said that he wouldn’t sell his ticket for any price. “Everyone has a price,” Ariely claims to have told him. O.K., Joseph responded, how about three grand? On average, the amount that winners were willing to accept for their tickets was twenty-four hundred dollars. On average, the amount that losers were willing to offer was only a hundred and seventy-five dollars. Out of a hundred fans, Ariely reports, not a single ticket holder would sell for a price that a non-ticket holder would pay.

Whatever else it accomplishes, “Predictably Irrational” demonstrates that behavioral economists are willing to experiment on just about anybody. One of the more compelling studies described in the book involved trick-or-treaters. A few Halloweens ago, Ariely laid in a supply of Hershey’s Kisses and two kinds of Snickers—regular two-ounce bars and one-ounce miniatures. When the first children came to his door, he handed each of them three Kisses, then offered to make a deal. If they wanted to, the kids could trade one Kiss for a mini-Snickers or two Kisses for a full-sized bar. Almost all of them took the deal and, proving their skills as sugar maximizers, opted for the two-Kiss trade. At some point, Ariely shifted the terms: kids could now trade one of their three Kisses for the larger bar or get a mini-Snickers without giving up anything. In terms of sheer chocolatiness, the trade for the larger bar was still by far the better deal. But, faced with the prospect of getting a mini-Snickers for nothing, the trick-or-treaters could no longer reckon properly. Most of them refused the trade, even though it cost them candy. Ariely speculates that behind the kids’ miscalculation was anxiety. As he puts it, “There’s no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item (it’s free).” Tellingly, when Ariely performed a similar experiment on adults, they made the same mistake. “If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that we are all pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend,” he writes.

A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its figures for 2007. They showed that Americans had collectively amassed ten trillion one hundred and eighty-four billion dollars in disposable income and spent very nearly all of it—ten trillion one hundred and thirty-two billion dollars. This rate of spending was somewhat lower than the rate in 2006, when Americans spent all but thirty-nine billion dollars of their total disposable income.

According to standard economic theory, the U.S. savings rate also represents rational choice: Americans, having reviewed their options, have collectively resolved to spend virtually all the money that they have. According to behavioral economists, the low savings rate has a more immediate explanation: it proves—yet again—that people have trouble acting in their own best interests. It’s worth noting that Americans, even as they continue to spend, say that they should be putting more money away; one study of participants in 401(k) plans found that more than two-thirds believed their savings rate to be “too low.”

In the forthcoming “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” (Yale; $25), Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein follow behavioral economics out of the realm of experiment and into the realm of social policy. Thaler and Sunstein both teach at the University of Chicago, Thaler in the graduate school of business and Sunstein at the law school. They share with Ariely the belief that, faced with certain options, people will consistently make the wrong choice.Therefore, they argue, people should be offered options that work with, rather than against, their unreasoning tendencies. These foolish-proof choices they label “nudges.” (A “nudge,” they note with scholarly care, should not be confused with a “noodge.”)

A typical “nudge” is a scheme that Thaler and Sunstein call “Save More Tomorrow.” One of the reasons people have such a hard time putting money away, the authors say, is that they are loss-averse. They are pained by any reduction in their take-home pay—even when it’s going toward their own retirement. Under “Save More Tomorrow,” employees commit to contributing a greater proportion of their paychecks to their retirement over time, but the increases are scheduled to coincide with their annual raises, so their paychecks never shrink. (The “Save More Tomorrow” scheme was developed by Thaler and the U.C.L.A. economist Shlomo Benartzi, back in 1996, and has already been implemented by several thousand retirement plans.)

People aren’t just loss-averse; they are also effort-averse. They hate having to go to the benefits office, pick up a bunch of forms, fill them out, and bring them all the way back. As a consequence, many eligible employees fail to enroll in their companies’ retirement plans, or delay doing so for years. (This is the case, research has shown, even at companies where no employee contribution is required.) Thaler and Sunstein propose putting this sort of inertia to use by inverting the choice that’s presented. Instead of having to make the trip to the benefits office to opt in, employees should have to make that trip only if they want to opt out. The same basic argument holds whenever a so-called default option is provided. For instance, most states in the U.S. require that those who want to become organ donors register their consent; in this way, many potential donors are lost. An alternative—used, for example, in Austria—is to make consent the default option, and put the burden of registering on those who do not wish to be donors. (It has been estimated that if every state in the U.S. simply switched from an “explicit consent” to a “presumed consent” system several thousand lives would be saved each year.)

“Nudges” could also involve disclosure requirements. To discourage credit-card debt, for instance, Thaler and Sunstein recommend that cardholders receive annual statements detailing how much they have already squandered in late fees and interest. To encourage energy conservation, they propose that new cars come with stickers showing how many dollars’ worth of gasoline they are likely to burn through in five years of driving.

Many of the suggestions in “Nudge” seem like good ideas, and even, as with “Save More Tomorrow,” practical ones. The whole project, though, as Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge, raises some pretty awkward questions. If the “nudgee” can’t be depended on to recognize his own best interests, why stop at a nudge? Why not offer a “push,” or perhaps even a “shove”? And if people can’t be trusted to make the right choices for themselves how can they possibly be trusted to make the right decisions for the rest of us?

Like neoclassical economics, much democratic theory rests on the assumption that people are rational. Here, too, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Voters, it has been demonstrated, are influenced by factors ranging from how names are placed on a ballot to the jut of a politician’s jaw. A 2004 study of New York City primary-election results put the advantage of being listed first on the ballot for a local office at more than three per cent—enough of a boost to turn many races. (For statewide office, the advantage was around two per cent.) A 2005 study, conducted by psychologists at Princeton, showed that it was possible to predict the results of congressional contests by using photographs. Researchers presented subjects with fleeting images of candidates’ faces. Those candidates who, in the subjects’ opinion, looked more “competent” won about seventy per cent of the time.

When it comes to public-policy decisions, people exhibit curious—but, once again, predictable—biases. They value a service (say, upgrading fire equipment) more when it is described in isolation than when it is presented as part of a larger good (say, improving disaster preparedness). They are keen on tax “bonuses” but dislike tax “penalties,” even though the two are functionally equivalent. They are more inclined to favor a public policy when it is labelled the status quo. In assessing a policy’s benefits, they tend to ignore whole orders of magnitude. In an experiment demonstrating this last effect, sometimes called “scope insensitivity,” subjects were told that migrating birds were drowning in ponds of oil. They were then asked how much they would pay to prevent the deaths by erecting nets. To save two thousand birds, the subjects were willing to pay, on average, eighty dollars. To save twenty thousand birds, they were willing to pay only seventy-eight dollars, and to save two hundred thousand birds they were willing to pay eighty-eight dollars.

What is to be done with information like this? We can try to become more aware of the patterns governing our blunders, as “Predictably Irrational” urges. Or we can try to prod people toward more rational choices, as “Nudge” suggests. But if we really are wired to make certain kinds of mistakes, as Thaler and Sunstein and Ariely all argue, we will, it seems safe to predict, keep finding new ways to make them. (Ariely confesses that he recently bought a thirty-thousand-dollar car after reading an ad offering FREE oil changes for the next three years.)

If there is any consolation to take from behavioral economics—and this impulse itself probably counts as irrational—it is that irrationality is not always altogether a bad thing. What we most value in other people, after all, has little to do with the values of economics. (Who wants a friend or a lover who is too precise a calculator?) Some of the same experiments that demonstrate people’s weak-mindedness also reveal, to use a quaint term, their humanity. One study that Ariely relates explored people’s willingness to perform a task for different levels of compensation. Subjects were willing to help out—moving a couch, performing a tedious exercise on a computer—when they were offered a reasonable wage. When they were offered less, they were less likely to make an effort, but when they were asked to contribute their labor for nothing they started trying again. People, it turns out, want to be generous and they want to retain their dignity—even when it doesn’t really make sense. ♦

A questão da metodologia de Finanças Comportamentais

Um dos problemas interessantes de FC é a questão metodológica. Boa parte dos artigos desenvolvidos neste campo tem sua origem em situações experimentais. Geralmente um questionário com uma situação problema é aplicado e solicita-se ao respondente que escolha uma alternativa. Este tipo de metodologia tem recebido críticas - apesar de ter sido coroado recentemente com um Nobel em economia - por não expressar a realidade. Como testar o comportamento dos indivíduos diante de situações reais?

O texto a seguir reconhece os limites dos experimentos em laboratórios e afirma que as evidências sugerem que as anomalias de comportamento são menos pronunciadas na prática do que previamente observada em laboratório.

"Homo Economicus Evolves"

Steven D. Levitt and John A. List on behavioral economics. This is from Science:

Homo economicus Evolves Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, Science 15 February 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5865, pp. 909 - 910 DOI: 10.1126/science.1153640: ...The discipline of economics is built on the shoulders of the mythical species Homo economicus. Unlike his uncle, Homo sapiens, H. economicus is unswervingly rational, completely selfish, and can effortlessly solve even the most difficult optimization problems. This rational paradigm has served economics well, providing a coherent framework for modeling human behavior. However, a small but vocal movement in economics has sought to dethrone H. economicus, replacing him with someone who acts "more human." This insurgent branch, commonly referred to as behavioral economics, argues that actual human behavior deviates from the rational model in predictable ways. Incorporating these features into economic models, proponents argue, should improve our ability to explain observed behavior. ...

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing behavioral economics is demonstrating its applicability in the real world. In nearly every instance, the strongest empirical evidence in favor of behavioral anomalies emerges from the lab. Yet, there are many reasons to suspect that these laboratory findings might fail to generalize to real markets. We have recently discussed [11] several factors, ranging from the properties of the situation--such as the nature and extent of scrutiny--to individual expectations and the type of actor involved. For example, the competitive nature of markets encourages individualistic behavior and selects for participants with those tendencies. Compared to lab behavior, therefore, the combination of market forces and experience might lessen the importance of these qualities in everyday markets.

Recognizing the limits of laboratory experiments, researchers have turned to "field experiments" to test behavioral models [12]. Field experiments ... avoid many of the important obstacles to generalizability faced by lab experiments.

Some evidence thus far suggests that behavioral anomalies are less pronounced than was previously observed in the lab [13] . For example, sports card dealers in a laboratory setting are driven strongly by positive reciprocity, i.e., the seller provides a higher quality of good than is necessary, especially when the buyer offers to pay a generous price. This is true even though the buyer has no recourse when the seller delivers low quality in the lab experiment. Yet, this same set of sports card traders in a natural field experiment behaves far more selfishly. They provide far lower quality on average when faced with the same buyer offers and increase quality little in response to a generous offer from the buyer. ...

Stigler (16) wrote that economic theories should be judged by three criteria: generality, congruence with reality, and tractability. We view the most recent surge in behavioral economics as adding fruitful insights--it makes sense to pay attention to good psychology. At the very least, psychological insights induce new ways to conceptualize problems and provide interesting avenues of research. In their finest form, such insights provide a deeper means to describe and even shape behaviors. One important practical example involves savings decisions, where it has been shown that decision-makers have a strong tendency to adhere to whatever plan is presented to them as the default option, regardless of its characteristics. ... The changes in behavior induced by changing default rules dwarf more "rational" approaches to influence choice such as information provision or financial education.

Behavioral economics stands today at a crossroads. On the modeling side, researchers should integrate the existing behavioral models and empirical results into a unified theory rather than a collection of interesting insights, allowing the enterprise to fulfill its enormous potential. To be empirically relevant, the anomalies that arise so frequently and powerfully in the laboratory must also manifest themselves in naturally occurring settings of interest. Further exploring how markets and market experience influence behavior represents an important line of future inquiry. ...

Grifo meu.

Efeito Hawthorne

O efeito Hawthorne (aqui) descreve uma mudança no comportamento ou no desempenho de funcionários em resposta a mudanças ambientais. O nome é originário das experiências de cientistas na fábrica de Hawthorne, que originou o desenvolvimento do campo das relações humanas na administração, em contraposição aos conceitos tayloristas. Aqui, este link informa alguns problemas da experiência.

Links em Finanças Comportamentais

1. A Perda da GM e a aversão à perda

2. Valor de um médico e a questão da satisfação do trabalho

3. Adaptação

4. Efeito placebo, Artur Anderson, auditoria e Enron

Efeito manada

Em momentos de crise, a questão da racionalidade (e o contraponto das finanças comportamentais) são utéis para entender o que aconteceu. Estudar efeito manada e como os indivíduos são levados para uma situação de excesso de otimismo é importante e ajuda a entender o que ocorreu. O artigo a seguir mostra um pouco desta visão:

O contágio do passado na decisão de aplicação
Aquiles Mosca
Valor Econômico - 13/02/2008

"Rentabilidade passada não é garantia de rentabilidade futura". Apesar de simples, a frase de alerta que acompanha os prospectos dos investimentos parece lutar em vão contra ao menos três tendências comportamentais. Para a maioria dos investidores, uma aplicação, independentemente de seu risco, parece mais atraente quanto maior o retorno apresentado no passado recente, a despeito de qualquer aviso que o regulador determine obrigatoriamente.

Estudos indicam que as expectativas que formamos em qualquer situação que exija avaliação em condição de incerteza são, em grande parte, uma extrapolação do que foi observado no passado recente. Isso vale para circunstâncias que envolvam um futuro incerto, como previsão do tempo ou a performance de aplicações.

Bange (2000) demonstra em um estudo para a Associação Americana de Investidores Individuais que não apenas o aplicador extrapola para o futuro a performance passada, mas também há a tendência de aumentar a parcela de sua carteira em ativos que tiveram retornos atraentes no passado. Assim, quanto mais o mercado sobe (como visto no Brasil entre 2003 e 2007), mais os investidores ficam otimistas com a performance esperada das aplicações de risco, aumentando ao mesmo tempo sua exposição em tais mercados. Em um cenário de baixa (como o atual), observamos o efeito inverso. Ao portar-se de tal forma, o aplicador acaba executando para a carteira o inverso do que é recomendado, isto é, compra ativos que estão em alta (compra caro) e vende os que estão em queda (vende barato).

O investidor que se comporta dessa maneira é denominado "momentum investor", ou aquele que crê, conscientemente ou não, na continuidade dos movimentos do mercado. Há também os chamados "contrarian investors", que crêem na reversão das tendências.

Estudo da Universidade de Yale (Dhar e Kumar 2001) buscou identificar qual grupo é predominante, usando uma amostra de 41 mil investidores do mercado de ações americano. Fica claro no estudo que a performance observada entre uma semana e três meses é o principal fator que atua na tomada de decisão. O número de investidores que age no sentido oposto à tendência corrente é 25% inferior ao dos que se deixam levar pela tendência observada. O estudo foi repetido em mercados emergentes e revelou a mesma conclusão, mostrando que o efeito "momentum" é mais significativo em ativos com performance extrema, como no mercado acionário.

Observando os dados relativos a investimentos de pessoas físicas no mercado de fundos de ações no Brasil em 2007, temos forte evidência do fator "momentum" nas decisões dos investidores. Por exemplo, as aplicações em fundos Vale, que em média renderam 84% em 2007, ante 44% do Ibovespa, lideraram o fluxo de investimentos em fundos de renda variável no ano passado, totalizando 50% do total investido em fundos de ações nesse ano. Em contrapartida, a média dos fundos de ações após três meses de performance negativa, entre novembro e janeiro, passou a sofrer saques líquidos. Não por coincidência, no mesmo período os fundos DI, seguros e em terreno positivo, voltaram pela primeira vez em 12 meses a receber ingressos líquidos.

Observamos em momentos como o atual uma tendência dos agentes de inferir que a realização observada ontem tende a continuar. Basta ler nos jornais a avaliação de analistas para confirmar esse fenômeno. Isso equivale a prever o futuro com base no passado, a chamada "representatividade" na teoria financeira comportamental. Esse fator é acentuado pela ampla divulgação na mídia dos estragos sofridos pelo mercado. Tal disseminação recebe o nome de "saliência" na teoria comportamental e refere-se à grande disponibilidade de informação relativa a um fato e ao peso que essas informações, salientes para o investidor, têm na formação de expectativas e na tomada de decisão, sendo o principal combustível do efeito contágio.

O componente final que define o comportamento do investidor refere-se à necessidade que os agentes têm de agir em conformidade com o grupo. Se todos estão vendendo, também tendemos a vender e vice-versa. Afinal, errar em companhia da maioria é menos desgastante. Esse é o principal combustível do efeito manada, que tende a acentuar o efeito contágio e a magnificar a amplitude de variação dos preços, realimentando o processo e definindo a direção do fluxo de recursos para os ativos.

Ante essas tendências, alertar o investidor que "rentabilidade passada não garante rentabilidade futura" é tão útil quanto dizer a uma criança com um chocolate que comer doce antes da refeição estraga o apetite. O pai cumpre com seu dever de zelar pela nutrição, a criança come o doce de qualquer jeito e, se der dor de barriga, o pai pode dizer com toda autoridade: "Eu bem que avisei!"

Enviado por Ricardo Viana

Adaptação

A palavra "adaptação" é muito conhecida de todos nós. Um texto de 1978, “Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?”, de Brickman et al, mostrou que pessoas paraplégicas não são menos felizes de outros grupos. Agora, quatro autores (Andrew Clark, Ed Diener, Yannis Georgellis e Richard Lucas) fizeram uma pesquisa observando seis eventos na vida de uma indivíduo, como o casamento. O interessante é que os autores fizeram uma espécie de série histórica, mostrando como as pessoas evoluíram em termos de satisfação. Observe o gráfico abaixo mostrando a satisfação do homem antes e depois do desemprego e do casamento (nesta ordem).



O gráfico seguinte mostra a situação do divórcio e casamento para uma mulher.



Observe que em ambos os casos, o nível de felicidade com o casamento (segundo gráfico) aumenta para depois voltar ao normal.

Quem é melhor investidor: Homem ou Mulher?

Pesquisas mostraram que existem diferenças entre a forma como o homem e a mulher investem. A mulher é mais conservadora e concentra seus investimentos em títulos. Os homens são superconfiantes e assumem mais riscos. Em termos de racionalidade, a mulher tem um melhor resultado. O homem tende a fazer mais aplicações e resgates.

Clique aqui, aqui e aqui

Impostos e Finanças comportamentais

A teoria de finanças comportamentais pode ser usada para discutir a melhor forma de taxação. Um artigo de 31 de janeiro de 2008, do New York Times, que discute este ponto.

Rebate Psychology
By NICHOLAS EPLEY

THE House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday that would try to stimulate the economy, in part, by sending “tax rebates” to more than 100 million families. The logic of a tax rebate is that people will spend more money if they have more to spend. Unfortunately, psychology may interfere with that logic.

Research on decision-making demonstrates that describing a financial windfall as a “rebate” — instead of something equally accurate — increases the likelihood that people will save it. If Congress and President Bush want to increase consumer spending, they should have pitched these $600 and $1,200 checks as “tax bonuses” instead.

Changing the way that identical income is described can significantly affect how people spend it. In an experiment I conducted at Harvard with my colleagues Dennis Mak and Lorraine Chen Idson, participants were given a $50 check. They were told that this money came from a faculty member’s research budget, financed indirectly through tuition dollars. Roughly half of the participants had this money described as a “rebate,” whereas the others had it described as a “bonus.” When unexpectedly contacted one week later, participants who got a “rebate” reported spending less than half of what those who got a “bonus” reported spending ($9.55 versus $22.04, respectively).

We observed this same pattern in other experiments when participants were asked to keep a written record of their spending, as well as in experiments in which the participants were allowed to purchase items in the lab. “Rebates” are understood to be returns from money already spent. A rebate, psychologically speaking, is the return of a loss of one’s own money rather than a pure gain provided by someone else, so it is unlikely to be seen as extra spending money.

Getting a rebate is more like being reimbursed for travel expenses than like getting a year-end bonus. Reimbursements send people on trips to the bank. Bonuses send people on trips to the Bahamas.

This is more than merely a matter of political spin. Decisions depend very heavily on how people’s options are described.

People are more willing to treat 600 people infected with a deadly virus when they are told the treatment will save 200 of those lives, than when they are told that it will kill 400 of them. People are more likely to donate to a charity when the cost is described in terms of pennies per day instead of dollars per year. And more people say they could live on 80 percent of their income than say that they could save 20 percent of their income.

Descriptions are the psychological equivalent of a camera lens. Psychologists use the term “framing effects” to describe their influence. An investment banker who is delighted by saving $5 on a pair of shoes but disgusted by receiving $1,000 for a year-end bonus has experienced the power of framing effects.

If the current proposal for tax rebates sounds familiar, it’s because we have indeed been here before. In 2001, Congress and President Bush returned $38 billion to taxpayers in the form of $300 to $600 tax rebates, with the hope that Americans would stimulate the economy by spending them. But research conducted by two University of Michigan economists, Matthew Shapiro and Joel Slemrod, found that only 28 percent of the people in a national survey reported that they spent most of their rebate checks soon after receiving them. In a country where the personal savings rate has become negative by some accounts, people seem remarkably able to save at the very time their government needs them to spend.

In another experiment my colleagues and I conducted, taxpayers asked to recall the 2001 tax rebate reported that it seemed more like “extra income” when researchers described it as a tax bonus but more like “returned income” when it was described as a tax rebate.

This is exactly the kind of difference in perceptions that would increase spending of bonuses relative to rebates. Describing the checks as rebates highlights that this is simply one’s own money being returned. A bonus, however, is extra cash to be spent.

Under the House plan, the checks that would arrive in people’s mailboxes would go to those who pay the least income taxes, or even pay no income tax at all. Saying the checks are bonuses — or anything else that would call to mind thoughts of receiving a gift rather than getting a reimbursement — may not only be a more effective description for this stimulus package, but it may also be more accurate.

A hamburger can be described as 10 percent fat, but you had better call it 90 percent lean if you want your dinner guests to eat it. Politicians are thought to be expert spin doctors, able to choose the right words to fit any occasion, but they do not seem to be paying attention to how to sell the stimulus package so that consumers spend with patriotic abandon.

Nicholas Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

SG, os Cartões de Crédito do Governo Lula e as Finanças Comportamentais

Os problemas de controle interno no Societe Generale foram analisados sob diversas formas. Uma forma interessante de ver o que ocorreu neste banco é através das finanças comportamentais. Um estudo realizado nos Estados Unidos com estudantes que deveriam resolver uma lista de questões de matemática, mostrou algo interessante sobre a questão ética da desonestidade e a presença do dinheiro (moeda). Para o grupo de controle (1/3 dos alunos) a média de resolução das questões foi de 3,5 questões (o tempo era muito curto para resolver todas as questões). No segundo grupo, onde os pesquisadores permitiram que os alunos fossem desonestos e receberiam em dinheiro por sua desonestidade, a média de respostas corretas foi de 6,2 questões. Esta diferença mostra que estes alunos desonestos eram capazes de fazer trapaças para ganhar mais. Ao terceiro grupo, os pesquisadores permitiram também a trapaça, mas o "prêmio" não era em dinheiro, mas um substituto. Neste grupo os alunos responderam 9,4 questões.

Ou seja, com dinheiro, o aumento na desonestidade foi significativo. Mas com um ganho através de itens não monetários o aumento foi ainda maior.

Isto poderia ajudar a explicar o comportamento de pessoas que geralmente não acham desonesto tomar uma caneta emprestada e esquecer de devolver, mas consideram reprováveis atitudes como pegar dinheiro emprestado e não devolver.

O funcionário do Societe Generale talvez se enquadre nesta situação. O ministro de Estado que paga suas contas com o cartão corporativo do governo talvez não ache isto reprovável.

Aqui esta discussão é mais detalhada. Mais: aqui .

Mas destaco um trecho relevante sobre as conclusões da pesquisa:

"quando lidamos com uma moeda mais abstrata nossa moralidade é menos capaz de proteger-nos contra a desonestidade (...)"

Crise e Finanças Comportamentais

Em tempos de crise, explicações são necessárias. Como isto pode ocorrer? A visão tradicional de finanças, baseada no comportamento racional do investidor, não ajuda muito a explicar os problemas do mercado de capitais. Voltamos para as Finanças Comportamentais, com seus conceitos de framing, aversão à perda e, principalmente, efeito manada.

Num artigo publicado no Valor Econômico de 23/1/2008 (O problema é que os investidores só querem boas notícias), Vera Rita Ferreira usa estes conceitos para comentar sobre a crise. Sobre o efeito manada, a psicanalista afirma:

Oscilações importantes do mercado são terreno fértil para a eclosão do conhecido comportamento de manada. Somos dotados de um profundo sentido de desamparo e, como tentativa (vã) de nos afastarmos desse sentimento, buscamos refúgio na companhia de nossos pares. O problema é fazermos isso independentemente da direção que tomarem e mesmo quando contrária ao que acreditamos ser a melhor alternativa. Identificar essa sensação de solidão ativa, medos e fantasmas mais profundos pode ser o primeiro antídoto ao impulso de juntar-se à multidão, para que seja possível, então, usar a própria cabeça para decidir o que é melhor naquele caso. Por outro lado, há de se ficar alerta com relação à atração pelo comportamento oposto, de auto-confiança excessiva, de acreditar que tudo sabe e tudo pode. Se olharmos com cuidado, veremos que, ainda que possam levar sinais opostos, ambas são manifestações da mesma dificuldade para tolerar a própria fragilidade, e podem sinalizar necessidade de assessoria técnica para serem enfrentadas.

Não deixa de ser uma interpretação interessante para a situação atual. Um outro artigo, da InterPress Service, de 30/01/2008, Adid Aslam (Explicação sobe ciclo de penúrias financeiras que afligem a economia mundial) usa novamente o termo efeito manada para tentar entender a crise:

As acentuadas altas e baixas dos mercados são com freqüência atribuídas ao "instinto de manada" dos operadores, que compram ou se desfazem em massa de um determinado bônus ou ação.

Mas a análise de Aslam também mostra o aspecto político da crise, onde a mudança nas normas encorajou que o sistema financeiro assumisse riscos desnecessários. Para Aslam, as questão das normas incentivou o aumento de “artimanhas do setor financeiro”. Ele completa afirmando:

O empurrão final ocorreu em 1998-1998, quando as companhias financeiras, seguradoras e imobiliárias investiram em lobby outros US$ 200 milhões e contribuíram com US$ 150 milhões adicionais com os fundos de campanha de diversos legisladores, muitos deles membros das comissões de Finanças das duas câmaras do Congresso.
O então secretário do Tesouro, Robert Rubin, deu a luz verde do governo do ex-presidente Bill Clinton (1993-2001) para revogar a Lei de Bancos de 1933. Poucos dias depois Rubin anunciou que deixava a vida pública para voltar atividade privada, para trabalhar no Citigroup, o maior banco do mundo, junto com Sanford Weill, que havia lançado a ofensiva final contra a lei "anacrônica".

P.S. Agradeço a Ricardo Viana por enviar o artigo do Valor Econômico.