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The purpose of this paper is to depict how the author's way from standard finance to the first and second generations of behavioral finance illustrates the ongoing general transition.

The first generation, starting in the early 1980s, largely accepted standard finance's notion of people's wants as “rational” wants – restricted to the utilitarian benefits of high returns and low risk. That first generation commonly described people as “irrational” – succumbing to cognitive and emotional errors and misled on their way to their rational wants. The second generation describes people as normal.

It begins by acknowledging the full range of people's normal wants and their benefits – utilitarian, expressive and emotional – distinguishes normal wants from errors and offers guidance on using shortcuts and avoiding errors on the way to satisfying normal wants. People's normal wants include financial security, nurturing children and families, gaining high social status and staying true to values. People's normal wants, even more than their cognitive and emotional shortcuts and errors, underlie answers to important questions of finance, including saving and spending, portfolio construction, asset pricing and market efficiency.

The article identifies that people's normal wants include financial security, nurturing children and families, gaining high social status and staying true to values. People's normal wants, even more than their cognitive and emotional shortcuts and errors, underlie answers to important questions of finance, including saving and spending, portfolio construction, asset pricing and market efficiency.

Interviews in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and India indicate net present value (NPV) is not widely employed in making capital investment decisions in these newly industrialized and developing countries. It is not from lack of knowledge about net present value: rather, it is due to (1) widespread violation of the assumptions underlying NPV, (2) the high risk/high return nature of the capital investments, and (3) the decision‐making process employed in making capital investment decisions. These same three conditions exist for many capital investment decisions made by firms in developed countries. Only by abandoning the static NPV approach, building in real options, and understanding and building in the decision‐making process will further advances be made in capital budgeting decision‐making. One of the key paradigms in finance is net present value (NPV). In order to maximize value, managers should accept all positive NPV investment projects, and reject all negative NPV projects. The issue becomes more complex when uncertainty is introduced, or, as in recent years, when real options to defer, abandon, expand, etc. are incorporated into the decision‐making process [e.g., Dixit and Pindyck (1994) and Trigeorgis (1995 and 1996)]. However, with these exceptions, the state of the art in capital investment decision‐making revolves around the simple statement—take all positive NPV projects. In practice, evidence from surveys and discussions with corporate executives indicates the message taught for the last 30 years in business schools has been heard and, to a large extent, acted upon by larger U.S., Canadian, and British‐based firms. While larger firms in North America, and to a lesser extent Western Europe, generally employ the static, or traditional, NPV framework for making, or assisting in making, capital investment decisions, less is known about the decision‐making process employed by firms in other parts of the world. The question addressed in this study is: “Do firms in other parts of the world, especially in newly industrialized or developing countries in the Asia Pacific region, employ NPV for making capital investment decisions?” The purposes of this study are threefold: (1) to report the results of a series of open‐ended interviews conducted in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and India about the capital investment decision‐making process employed; (2) to understand why NPV is not widely employed in making capital investment decisions in these newly industrialized and developing countries; and, most important, (3) to indicate that NPV and the capital budgeting decision‐making process need rethinking and refocusing to make them more effective—in all countries, whether developed, newly industrialized, or developing. The paper proceeds in the following manner. Section I provides an introduction to the study. In Section II the results of the interviews are presented. In Section III patterns that emerged during the interview process are presented, along with a number of specific examples of the types of capital investment decisions being considered. In Section IV the assumptions underlying NPV are examined, and then risk/return and the decision‐making process are considered. Section V contains the discussion and conclusions.

The paper aims to provide the individual routes of the authors into behavioural finance in order to introduce the special issue.

The paper provides the background to the authors' personal route into behavioural finance.

The paper highlights general themes of development and influence of behavioural finance and relationships with practice and other areas of academic finance.

The paper offers the perspectives of the authors on how they feel the research area of behavioural finance will develop in the future.

Finance textbooks typically state that 8 to 20 stocks can provide adequate diversification for a portfolio. However, these recommendations usually assume a short time horizon such as one year. We examine 20‐year cumulative rates of return and ending wealth from an initial $100,000 investment allocated among 100 large U.S. stocks. Probability distributions obtained from simulations illustrate the shortfall risk faced by investors who own fewer titan 100 stocks. Five percent of the 20‐stock portfolios have ending wealth shortfalls exceeding 28%. These findings suggest that 8 to 20 stocks may be insufficient for long‐term investors.

There was unfinished business to address in the version of the planner–doer model developed in Thaler and Shefrin (1981). The unfinished business involved identifying and modeling the crucial roles played by temptation and mental accounting in pensions and savings behavior. The present paper has two objectives.

The first objective is to describe the key lessons learned in transitioning from the model in Thaler and Shefrin (1981) to the model in Shefrin and Thaler (1988), a transition which addressed some of the unfinished business. The second objective is to describe as yet unfinished business associated with developing a multicommodity, intertemporal version of the planner–doer framework, incorporating the concepts of temptation and mental accounting, to replace the neoclassical theory of the consumer.

Doing so will provide a theoretical foundation for nudges related to household budgeting, spending, saving, borrowing and investing.

This paper presents the first behavioral theory of the consumer, focusing on the manner in which consumers actually make decisions about budgeting, spending. borrowing and saving. The approach in the paper can be viewed as a behavioral counterpart to the neoclassical theory of the consumer. In contrast to the neoclassical approach, which assumes that consumers set and follow utility maximizing budgets, the empirical evidence indicates that only a small minority of consumers describe themselves as setting and following budgets. The behavioral theory presented here focuses on the heuristic nature of consumers' actual budgeting processes and extends the approach described in Thaler and Shefrin's 1981 seminal paper on self-control. The core of the present paper is a working paper which Shefrin and Thaler began in 1980, and as such represents unfinished business from that time. The first part of this paper describes earlier unfinished business from the 1981 framework that the authors subsequently addressed as they developed the behavioral life cycle hypothesis during the 1980s.