WITHDRAWN: An empirical study to analyze the human behavioral aspects on individual financial decisions based on Indian context

Abstract

Abstract The stream of behavioral finance is still in its infancy stage. Behavioral finance is gaining attention and interest of academic fraternity of late. Academicians are now trying to understand the concepts and theories on how investors become irrational while making investment decisions. In a developing economy like India, where there are large number of millennials and by considering their growing amount of interest in investments, studying behavioral finance can definitely add to the deep understanding of the topic. Present study is intended to examine the behavioral aspects influencing the individual financial decision making amongst Indians across various age groups, income sources, gender and native regions / domiciles. The objective and the scope of this project is to study two important theories in behavioral finance in Indian Context viz. prospects theory and mental accounting theory. SPSS 20 and STATA 15 have been used to validate the sample characteristics. There sample consisted of 223 respondents who were selected using multi-stage stratified sampling. It was found that there are two important factors /biases of prospect theory namely- loss aversion and regret aversion besides mental budgeting bias of mental accounting, which affect the financial decision making of Indians. The outcome of the research is not only important to the retail investors but also to the companies, which offer various investment instruments as it will help them to understand what are biases which are affecting individuals and retail investors.