参与惯性和投资选择

参与惯性是否影响了个体的投资选择?参与惯性是如何产生的?采用2006年中国9城市投资者调查数据,本文发现:在银行存款、外汇、股票、债券、期货、基金、借出、做生意、保险金、收藏品、房地产、理财产品、彩票等广义投资项目中,个体当前和未来期望的选择都表现出了参与惯性,即倾向于维持他们过去的选择;这种参与惯性是其禀赋效应或延迟决策等行为偏见的结果,而不是理性选择所致。本文的政策涵义在于:加强投资者教育,使其意识到并主动克服投资决策中的参与惯性,这是有效增进投资者福利的政府政策所需要考虑的。

Participation Inertia and Investment Choices

Does inertia affect individual investment participation choice? If so, where does the participation inertia come from? Based on an individual investor survey in 9 cities in China in 2006, I find that there is significant inertia to maintain those corresponding decisions in individual investors' current and future expected participation in saving, foreign exchange, stock, bond, futures, mutual fund, lending, business, insurance, collection, real estate, wealth-managing product, and lottery, behind which is a behavior bias caused by endowment effects or a tendency to procrastinate in decision making, but not a rational choice. The policy implications of current study is: improving investor education and making people realize their participation inertia in investment and hence overcome this inertia actively, should be taken into consideration by the government to improve investor welfare.