How emotions influence behavior in financial markets: a conceptual analysis and emotion-based account of buy-sell preferences

We develop a conceptual analysis and account of how emotions influence behavior in financial markets. To motivate our approach and to establish the need for such research, we first review the increasingly important literature on emotions in financial markets. While emotions influence investors in financial markets, there is a lack of precision concerning the exact nature of these influences. To remedy this, we identify and address a number of issues deriving from the current state of the finance literature. One issue concerns the lack of clarity in defining different emotion constructs. Another is the lack of a general emotion-based account of financial behavior. Our contribution is a classification of emotion-related phenomena and an emotion-based account of how anticipatory and anticipated emotions interact to determine investors’ buy and sell preferences in asset markets. Preliminary experimental results support our emotion-based account.