I’m a Swiss researcher and university professor who applies mathematics and psychology to build quantitative models for financial decision-making. Most of my scientific contributions belong to a field of research called behavioral finance, that is, the study of how psychology affects financial decisions. I love mathematics, and I am fascinated by its ability to describe complex mechanisms, including those that generate human behavior.
I wrote...
Behavioral Finance for Private Banking: From the Art of Advice to the Science of Advice
Financial well-being undoubtedly plays a crucial role in overall life satisfaction, yet it is just one facet of a multifaceted equation for me. Strikingly, my own experience with traditional financial advisory is that it often overlooks this essential fact, leaving a gap in the holistic approach to people's well-being.
This book provides a complete behavioural finance framework for wealth management tailored to the unique personality, needs, emotions, and expectations of each client. The book also emphasizes the importance of a solid and robust mathematical foundation. This foundation is essential for structuring each client's recommendations based on their individual characteristics, ensuring a personalized and effective approach to wealth management.
The book was, for me, an inspiring journey and an enriching learning experience. While conventional behavioral finance tends to analyze deviations from rationality within economic decisions, this book diverges, offering a holistic behavioral framework.
I like that the book views individuals not merely as economic agents but as complete beings, with financial well-being acting as a gauge for overall life prosperity. I believe that Prof. Statman's third generation of behavioral finance represents a paradigm shift towards a constructive scientific approach. I fully share its primary objective to empower individuals in their pursuit of personal fulfillment and satisfaction.
Unravel the complex relationship between finances and life well-being
In A Wealth of Well-Being: A Holistic Approach to Behavioral Finance, Professor Meir Statman, established thought leader in behavioral finance, explores how life well-being, the overarching aim of individuals in the third generation of behavioral finance, is underpinned by financial well-being, and how life well-being extends beyond financial well-being to family, friendship, religion, health, work, and education.
Combining recent scientific findings by scholars in finance, economics, law, medicine, psychology, and sociology with real-life stories at the intersection of finances and life, this book allows readers to clearly see how finances are…
This book inspired me to apply quantitative and theoretical models to analyse the impact of human psychology on financial decision-making. The book is sometimes a bit technical, but I felt that that the explanations around the mathematical requirements sufficiently supported the development of my own intuition about their economic and psychological motivation.
I learned from this book how to combine economic theory and psychology to explain empirical and experimental evidence on asset prices. As a mathematician, I was excited to learn how Prof. Shefrin mathematically included psychological factors in classical models for financial decision-making and analyzed the implications for asset prices.
Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory.
From this book, I learned that cognitive errors and human misbehaviours are not necessarily in contradiction to rationality.
It taught me that the generally negative perspective on psychological mechanisms provided by behavioural economics is limited. By contrast, a deeper understanding of what rationality means is needed. This book enriched my own way of analyzing how psychological factors impact daily decisions.
For a long time, economists have assumed that we were cold, self-centred, rational decision makers - so-called Homo economicus; the last few decades have shattered this view. The world we live in and the situations we face are of course rich and complex, revealing puzzling aspects of our behaviour. Optimally Irrational argues that our improved understanding of human behaviour shows that apparent 'biases' are good solutions to practical problems - that many of the 'flaws' identified by behavioural economics are actually adaptive solutions. Page delivers an ambitious overview of the literature in behavioural economics and, through the exposition of these…
As a mathematician, I learned that constraints could push us away from optimality. Well, we still seek for optimality, but under constraints we can only be worse off than without. Reading this book, I learned that our life has plenty of unnecessary constraints that Prof. Sunstein calls sludge.
This book was a revelation because I was always tempted to consider misbehavior as a lack of judgment, self-control, etc. However, this book gave me a different perspective. Maybe as human beings, we strive for optimality, but the many constraints out there do not always allow us to act like a Homo Economicus.
The New York Times–bestselling author of Nudge reveals how we became so burdened by red tape and unnecessary paperwork—and why we must do better.
“If nudges have a mortal enemy, or perhaps the equivalent of antimatter to matter, it’s ‘sludge’.” —Forbes
We’ve all had to fight our way through administrative sludge—filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge, it can also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality. Confronted by sludge, people just give up—and…
This book is certainly the most technical among my favorites. However, I cannot resist listing it here because I really love it. Honestly, I highly esteem Peter Wakker, and I learned tremendously much from his scientific papers. Therefore, I read this book with high expectations, and these were fully fulfilled.
I learned from this book what prospect theory is and how it developed. I learned Prof. Wakker’s view on decision theory, and this strongly shaped my personal understanding of many decision-theoretical problems.
Prospect Theory: For Risk and Ambiguity, provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook treatment of the way decisions are made both when we have the statistical probabilities associated with uncertain future events (risk) and when we lack them (ambiguity). The book presents models, primarily prospect theory, that are both tractable and psychologically realistic. A method of presentation is chosen that makes the empirical meaning of each theoretical model completely transparent. Prospect theory has many applications in a wide variety of disciplines. The material in the book has been carefully organized to allow readers to select pathways through the book relevant to…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives…
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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