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Investor and market overreaction: a retrospective

Werner De Bondt (Department of Business and Economics, Seattle University, Seattle, Washington, USA)

Review of Behavioral Finance

ISSN: 1940-5979

Article publication date: 20 May 2020

Issue publication date: 3 June 2020

1079

Abstract

Purpose

Are the capital markets of leading industrialized nations rational and efficient? This powerful hypothesis was badly dented by the work of De Bondt and Thaler (1985) on stock market overreaction and by subsequent research on momentum and reversals in prices and earnings.

Design/methodology/approach

Human psychology, at times predictably irrational, drives the markets. This paper investigates this issue.

Findings

The author reviews the origins of the idea of overreaction, how behavioral insights modify standard asset pricing theory and how they contribute to our understanding of the world of finance.

Originality/value

The paper reveals the origins of the idea of overreaction, how behavioral insights modify standard asset pricing theory and how they contribute to our understanding of the world of finance.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Professors Robert Hudson and Gulnur Muradoglu (the editors) for encouraging him to write this paper and to Richard H. Driehaus and Thomas F. Gleed for generous financial support.

Citation

De Bondt, W. (2020), "Investor and market overreaction: a retrospective", Review of Behavioral Finance, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 11-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/RBF-12-2019-0175

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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