Understanding Behavioral Finance and Economics

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

Historical Review

By: Dr. David Edward Marcinko; MBA, MEd, CMP™

By: Eugene Schmuckler; PhD, MBA, CTS

By: Dr. Kenneth H. Shubin-Stein, CFA

By: Richard B. Wagner; JD, CFP®

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Validating the emerging alliance between psychology (human behavior) and finance (economics) is the fact that two Americans won the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s, 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. Their research was nothing short of an explanation for the idiosyncrasies incumbent in human financial decision-making outcomes.

The Pioneers

Daniel Kahneman, PhD, professor of psychology at Princeton University, and Vernon L. Smith, PhD, professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., shared the prize for work that provided insight on everything from stock market bubbles, to regulating utilities, and countless other economic activities. In several cases, the winners tried to explain apparent financial paradoxes.

The Experiments

For example, Professor Kahneman made the economically puzzling discovery that most of his subjects would make a 20-minute trip to buy a calculator for $10 instead of $15, but would not make the same trip to buy a jacket for $120 instead of $125, saving the same $5.

Initially, in the 1960’s, Smith set out to demonstrate how economic theory worked in the laboratory (in vitro), while Kahneman was more interested in the ways economic theory mis-predicted people in real-life (in-vivo). He tested the limits of standard economic choice theory in predicting the actions of real people, and his work formalized laboratory techniques for studying economic decision making, with a focus on trading and bargaining.

Academe’

Later, Smith and Kahneman together were among the first economists to make experimental data a cornerstone of academic output. Their studies included people playing games of cooperation and trust, and simulating different types of markets in a laboratory setting. Their theories assumed that individuals make decisions systematically, based on preferences and available information, in a way that changes little over time, or in different contexts. By the late 1970’s, Richard H. Thaler, PhD, an economist at the University of Chicago also began to perform behavioral experiments further suggesting irrational wrinkles in standard financial theory and behavior, enhancing the still embryonic but increasingly popular theories of Kahneman and Smith.

Other Pioneers

Other economists’ laboratory experiments used ideas about competitive interactions pioneered by game theorists like John Forbes Nash Jr., PhD, who shared the Nobel in 1994, as points of reference. But, Kahneman and Smith often concentrated on cases where people’s actions depart from the systematic, rational strategies that Nash envisioned. Psychologically, this was all a precursor to the informal concept of life planning.

Enter the Financial Planners

Of course, comprehensive financial planners have always consulted with their clients regarding their goals and objectives, hopes and dreams, but typically from the point of view of money goals, rather than life ideals or business goals. The absence, or presence of biological and/or psychological reasons for them was never conceived, nor discussed. But, quantifying future subjective and objective goals, and doing a technical analysis of factors such as risk tolerance, age, insurance, tax, investing, retirement and estate planning needs, has certainly been the norm, especially for Certified Medical Planners (CMP).

Assessmentcmp-logo

Life planning and behavioral finance then, as proposed for physicians and integrated by the Institute of Medical Business Advisors (iMBA) is somewhat similar. Its uniqueness emanates from a holistic union of personal financial planning and medical practice management, solely for the healthcare space.  Unlike pure life planning, pure financial planning, or pure management theory, it is both a quantitative and qualitative “hard and soft” science. It has an ambitious economic, psychological and managerial niche value proposition never before proposed and codified, while still representing an evolving philosophy. Its’ zealous practitioners are called Certified Medical Planners (CMPs).

www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

Conclusion

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