Behavioural Biases in Conventional and Sustainable Investment Decisions in Emerging Markets: A Bibliometric and Systematic Review with a Research Agenda

This study maps and synthesises research on behavioural biases and investor decision-making in emerging markets, including sustainable investing, to identify the field’s structure, the consistency of its evidence and its gaps. Following PRISMA 2020, three Scopus search strings (2010–2026) returned 1037 unique records, which were screened against six pre-defined criteria, including a uniform requirement that the empirical setting be an emerging or developing market. The 399 eligible documents were analysed bibliometrically (performance analysis, construct co-occurrence and thematic mapping), and the 386 empirical studies among them were coded with a structured extraction form, appraised for methodological quality and synthesised without meta-analysis by vote counting of effect directions, with sign tests, sensitivity analyses and GRADE-adapted certainty ratings. Output grew by 27.1% a year (2011–2025) and is concentrated in India, China, Indonesia and Pakistan, while GCC markets are the setting of 4.3% of documents. Of 328 bias–outcome associations reported by 152 individual-investor studies, 62.5% use generic self-reported “investment decision” scales and 41.5% are reported without a direction of effect. The most consistent findings are that overconfidence is associated with more trading activity (10 of 10 studies reporting a direction; low certainty) and that market-wide herding is conditional on down markets and crises (unconditional in seven of 26 tests; moderate certainty). Mediation by risk perception rests on 17 cross-sectional surveys concentrated in South Asia (low certainty), herding is inconsistently related to individual decisions, and financial literacy is associated with fewer cognitive biases but not with less overconfidence. Research should prioritise behavioural outcome data, measures of decision quality and multi-country designs before these mechanisms are treated as established.