Professor at the Management Center Innsbruck
I am a Professor at the Management Center Innsbruck. My main research interests are:
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Previous studies have found that cognitive biases can cause mistakes in the financial decision-making of private households, while increased experience in financial markets improves it. Yet, it remains unclear whether experience mitigates psychological distortions or whether it worsens them. This study considers two causes, inexperience and overreaction to price movements, of a well-established phenomenon on the stock market called `excessive trading': large trading volumes leading to decreased net portfolio returns via increased transaction costs. Creating a stylized hold or trade-scenario in a computer laboratory experiment, I confirm both inexperience and overreaction as robust drivers of trading activity. The 2x2 experimental design featuring overlapping treatments allows to disentangle the two direct effects from their interaction. The results show no signs of dependencies between the two channels, suggesting that psychological distortions are immutable personal characteristics that cannot be unlearned.
Purpose: Successful completion of higher education is a significant factor of both individual and national development. Self-esteem has been neglected in previous empirical research as a constraint in course completion. We investigate this factor as a basis to develop suitable interventions.
Design/Method/Approach: We use secondary, administrative data of course completion from fully accredited Bachelor- and Master-courses at an Austrian higher education institution.
Findings: Self-Esteem, using measures of social comparison and gender as proxies, lead to reductions of successful completion of higher education.
Theoretical Implications: Internal constraints, i.e. fragile self-esteem, impacts course completion in higher education.
Practical Implications: National and educational institutions aiming at supporting students should focus on emotional support programs alongside professional support programs.
Originality/Value: We offer tentative first evidence of a novel theory on the impact of fragile self-esteem on intertemporal choices, applied to the context of higher education.
Research Limitations/Future Research: An empirical analysis of higher education performance based on a model unifying both ability and self-esteem constraints would provide an ambitious, but interesting avenue for further research.
This paper empirically evaluates the relationship between the university admission process and the study success of online students. We investigate data from fully accredited higher education courses over multiple cohorts, including both Bachelor- and Master-studies. We link rankings from 3 test-procedures, an interview, a resume analysis and an aptitude test, with grade achievements and successful course completion. We find that all procedures predict grades, but only the resume analysis has a robust relationship with successful course completion. Crucially, the predictive power of the resume analysis depends on controlling for a student’s age. Our results thus call for nuance in evaluating and interpreting admission scores when allocating seats in online education.
This paper studies a firm's organisational responses if its agents misevaluate information. If a manager overreacts to unusual events, it may be desirable for the firm to adopt the management practice management- by-exception. I develop a theoretical framework to study this technique and derive conditions under parsimonious assumptions for when it should be adopted. Moreover, I show how further assumptions can refine the model's predictions, establishing a direct link between the manager's overresponsiveness and organisational rigidity. The strategy is implemented by controlling the information that the manager receives. In fact, in the absence of information transmission and processing costs, it may be optimal to not send inherently valuable signals concerning the economy's state to the manager.
Demand for mental health treatment regularly exceeds the supply. Determining who gets priority in subsidized mental health services is challenging and complex. This thesis sets out to scrutinize the rater-independence of a newly introduced patient prioritization tool used in a psychotherapy service. We find that the presence of certain raters is associated with the size of the priority score, which contradicts the intended fairness principle of patient prioritization tools. To illustrate the magnitude of the observed effects we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and find that such effects may unjustifiably extend waiting times by more than a month. Other measures that have been explained in the literature, such as sex, age, seasonal variations, weather, and land value of patient’s residence were included as controls to test the robustness of the rater effects. However, no meaningful changes were measured with controls being present, indicating the robustness of the effects.
The stock market should be a unique kind of casino, where the average person wins money over time. However, previous research shows that excessive stock market trading can contribute to financial losses --- just like in any other casino. While gambling research has documented the adverse consequences of problem gambling, there has been comparatively less behavioral finance research on the correlates of excessive stock market trading. This study aimed to document whether excessive stock trading was positively associated with problem gambling, and whether this hypothesized association was robust to controlling for demographics, and objective measures of overconfidence and financial literacy in a convenience sample of 798 US investors. We found that self-reported relative stock portfolio turnover was positively associated with problem gambling, that this association was robust to controls, and occurred equally over investors of all self-reported portfolio sizes. This study showed that problem gamblers may also make suboptimal risky choices more generally, and that a behavioral dependence explanation for suboptimal investment decisions should be subject to further investigation in the behavioral finance literature.
There are significant differences in real-life gambling behavior between Germany and Italy. Contemporary theories suggest that these differences in individual preferences would translate to differences in trading behavior. We elicited trading behavior from participants of both Italian and German language groups using a stylized hold or trade scenario distributed via a survey. Additionally, we collected data on their self-stated gambling preferences. Our findings confirm the existence of large and significant differences in gambling consumption, problem gambling, and trading behavior between the two nationalities. Furthermore, we observed that gambling preferences explain most of the national differences. This suggests that established factors of financial decision-making play a more prominent role in explaining national differences in trading behavior than any latent cultural factors.
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