Nudgitize Me! A Behavioral Finance Approach to Minimize Losses and Maximize Profits from Heuristics and Biases

Abstract

Behavioral Finance is one of the most novel developments in Behavioral Economics. Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices. Standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms were outlined to fail to explain how human actually behave. Human beings were rather found to use heuristics in the day-to-day decision making. These mental short cuts enable to cope with information overload in a complex world. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications in very many different domains. This paper reviews and proposes how to use mental heuristics, biases and nudges in the finance domain to profit from markets