A influência de fatores externos na tomada de decisões financeiras: Uma aplicação da teoria do prospecto

Abstract

Behavioral Economics has been of great importance for the understanding of economic and financial choices, through a broader bias, opposing some traditionally accepted paradigms of Neoclassical Economics and its principles of rationality of economic agents. This work presents an introduction to the fundamental concepts of Neoclassical Economics and Behavioral Economics. When approaching the concepts of Behavioral Economics, one of its most important cognitive biases is considered to be loss aversion. As a starting point, this work discusses the main research carried out in this area, the Prospect Theory, carried out by professors David Kahneman and Amós Tversky. A questionnaire was applied to a sample of students and professionals from areas such as Economics, Accounting, Administration, Psychology, Law, Medicine and Marketing, with the objective of evaluating whether studying one of the courses related financial markets, or whether professional experience would influence decisions under risk, and verifying the pattern of responses with the identified biases and heuristics in the pioneering research. The results suggest that individuals are not rational, and that the courses, being correlated or not, did not influence the agents' decision-making, presenting a congruent behavior to that identified in the original research of Kahneman and Tversky.