A study on investors’ personality characteristics and behavioral biases: Conservatism bias and availability bias in the Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

Most economic and finance theories are based on the assumption that during economic decision making, people would act totally rational and consider all available information. Nevertheless, behavioral finance focuses on studying of the role of psychological factors on economic participants’ behavior. The study shows that in real-world environment, people are influencedby emotional and cognitive errors and may make irrational financial decisions. In many cases, the participants of financial markets are not aware of their talents for error in decision making, so they are dissatisfied with their investments by considering some behavioral biases decisions. These decisions may often yield undesirable outcomes, which could influence economy, significantly. This paper presents a survey on the relationship between personality dimensions with behavioral biases and availability bias among investment managers in the Tehran Stock Exchange using SPSS software, descriptive and inferential statistics. The necessary data arecollected through questionnaire and they are analyzed using some statistical tests. The preliminary results indicate that there is a relationship between personality dimensions and behavioral biases like conservatism bias and availability bias among the investors in the Tehran Stock Exchange.