Aesthetics of stock investments

Abstract

Although there has been an increasing interest in the links between aesthetics and the market economy, researchers have largely ignored the aesthetics related to one class of economic behavior, i.e., individuals’ investments. The purpose of this article is to explicate what roles aesthetics may play in people’s evaluations of companies’ stocks as investment objects. First, the author explains that investment decisions are partly based on aesthetic intuition, which emerges as a counterpart to the logical‐epistemic analysis of company stocks. Second, it is explained that investment decisions are affected by the apprehended beauty of stocks in the sense of subjectively grasped “unity in variety” or “familiarity in the unfamiliar” which one may encounter when assessing a company and its earnings figures. Third, the author explains how an individual may actually have investment motives that go beyond the extrinsic/instrumental objective of maximizing expected financial returns. Such extra motives will be expressions of one’s ego or self and reflect the intrinsic appreciation of things represented by a company.