Final published version, 620 KB, PDF document
Research output: Working paper
Research output: Working paper
}
TY - UNPB
T1 - Visceral emotions, within-community communication, and (ill-judged) endorsement of financial propositions
AU - Kaivanto, Kim
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - The 2007-08 financial crisis exposed poignant examples of ill-judged risk accretion in both tails of the Lorenz curve: concentrations of inappropriate mortgages within low-income neighborhoods, and concentrations of Bernard Madoff’s victims within wealthy, predominantly Jewish country-club communities. These examples share three key elements. First, individual behavioural decision makers take decisions privately but contribute to the build-up of risk within the community. Second, sales agents employ psychological persuasion techniques (bypassing logical processes), and trigger visceral emotions (overriding rational deliberation). Third, community membership immerses individuals within information flows that trigger invidious visceral emotions, and leads to biased inferences due to sample-size illusion and persuasion bias. We develop a closed-form model based on Signal-Detection Theory (SDT) that incorporates all three abovementioned elements: it is behavioral in employing a Prospect Theory (PT) objective function; peripheral-route persuasion and visceral emotions are incorporated through their impacts on discriminability d′; and sample-size illusion and persuasion bias are incorporated through their effects on the score θ. This PT-SDT model predicts that visceral-emotion-charged hot states can short-circuit the capacity to practice caveat emptor, carrying implications for regulation and for our understanding of US household-borrowing growth 2001–2006.
AB - The 2007-08 financial crisis exposed poignant examples of ill-judged risk accretion in both tails of the Lorenz curve: concentrations of inappropriate mortgages within low-income neighborhoods, and concentrations of Bernard Madoff’s victims within wealthy, predominantly Jewish country-club communities. These examples share three key elements. First, individual behavioural decision makers take decisions privately but contribute to the build-up of risk within the community. Second, sales agents employ psychological persuasion techniques (bypassing logical processes), and trigger visceral emotions (overriding rational deliberation). Third, community membership immerses individuals within information flows that trigger invidious visceral emotions, and leads to biased inferences due to sample-size illusion and persuasion bias. We develop a closed-form model based on Signal-Detection Theory (SDT) that incorporates all three abovementioned elements: it is behavioral in employing a Prospect Theory (PT) objective function; peripheral-route persuasion and visceral emotions are incorporated through their impacts on discriminability d′; and sample-size illusion and persuasion bias are incorporated through their effects on the score θ. This PT-SDT model predicts that visceral-emotion-charged hot states can short-circuit the capacity to practice caveat emptor, carrying implications for regulation and for our understanding of US household-borrowing growth 2001–2006.
KW - within-community risk accretion
KW - signal detection theory
KW - prospect theory
KW - psychology of deception
KW - peripheral-route persuasion
KW - visceral emotions
KW - persuasion bias
KW - mortgage mis-selling
KW - predatory lending
KW - Madoff ponzi scheme
KW - caveat emptor
KW - accredited investor status
M3 - Working paper
T3 - Economics Working Paper Series
BT - Visceral emotions, within-community communication, and (ill-judged) endorsement of financial propositions
PB - Lancaster University, Department of Economics
CY - Lancaster
ER -