Heuristic. Psychological Aspects of Decision-Making on Capital Market - Literature Review

Abstract

Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore part of information. In classical view, heuristic decisions save effort, but imply greater errors then "rational" decisions, defined by logic and statistical model. It clearly emerges that in real life people do not always make rational decisions based on established preferences and complete information. In many ways their behavior thus contradicts the homo oeconomicus model. Much of the behaviour observed is caused through people trying to cope with the complexity of the world around them by approximating, because collating and evaluating all the factors of relevance to a decision overtaxes their mental processing capacity. These psychologically driven inadequacies also occur with investment decisions. Heuristics are simply a more effective way of evaluating choices in the rich and changing decision making environment investors must face. The aim of this paper is to review the impact of heuristics bias decision-making on capital market.