Behavioral Pattern and Pitfalls of U.S. Investors

This report is a companion piece to an annotated bibliography on the subject of the behavioral characteristics of U.S. investors. The primary goal of the report is to identify common investment mistakes and to provide scholarly commentary from university professors and professionals in the fields of economics, business, finance, psychology, and sociology. The secondary goal is to provide insights into how investors make the initial decision to invest and why some are reluctant to invest at all. Many of the scholars cited here have made seminal contributions to the analysis of the human element of investing. Students of their work can learn much about the patterns and pitfalls associated with investor behavior. Although the citation for each research study includes a URL directly accessing the article described, most of the URLs link to fee-based, subscriber databases. In general, the cited articles are available via a number of these vendor databases, such as JSTOR, EBSCO, ProQuest, NBER, or Wiley Interscience. The citation for each abstract also provides a URL linking to a Web site that offers free access to the article, such as a faculty Web site or other online source, if such a link is available. However, the Federal Research Division is unable to guarantee the stability of these additional links.