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Leicestershire Cooperative Society is one of the top eight Coops in the country, and has a turnover in excess of £160m. It provides a range of retail outlets including superstores, supermarkets, “Home” departments, chemists, and travel bureaux. One of their most successful ventures has been the development of All Hours convenience stores, open from 8am to 8pm Monday to Saturday, offering the convenience of local shopping. The stores feature a wide selection of groceries, fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and cakes, meat, provisions, frozen foods and wines and spirits. The name “All Hours” was the idea of Leicester Society's Retail Controller, Nigel Harvey, and he describes the stores in the article which follows.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of Review of Behavioural Finance entitled “Behavioural finance: the role of psychological factors in financial decisions”.

The authors present a brief outline of the origins of behavioural economics; discuss the role that experimental and survey methods play in the study of financial behaviour; summarise the contributions made by the papers in the issue and consider their implications; and assess why research in behavioural finance is important for finance researchers and practitioners.

The primary input to behavioural finance has been from experimental psychology. Methods developed within sociology such as surveys, interviews, participant observation, focus groups have not had the same degree of influence. Typically, these methods are even more expensive than experimental ones and so costs of using them may be one reason for their lack of impact. However, it is also possible that the training of finance academics leads them to prefer methodologies that permit greater control and a clearer causal interpretation.

The paper shows that interdisciplinary research is becoming more widespread and it is likely that greater collaboration between finance and sociology will develop in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether stock price predictions and investment decisions improve by exposure to increasing price series.

The authors conducted three laboratory experiments in which undergraduates were asked to role‐play being investors buying and selling stock shares. Their task was to predict an unknown closing price from an opening price and to choose the number of stocks to purchase to the opening price (risk aversion) or the closing price (risk taking). In Experiment 1 stock prices differed in volatility for increasing, decreasing or no price trend. Prices were in different conditions provided numerically for 15 trading days, for the last 10 trading days, or for the last five trading days. In Experiment 2 the price series were also visually displayed as scatter plots. In Experiment 3 the stock prices were presented for the preceding 15 days, only for each third day (five days) of the preceding 15 days, or as five prices, each aggregated for three consecutive days of the preceding 15 days. Only numerical price information was provided.

The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that predictions were not markedly worse for shorter than longer price series. Possibly because longer price series increase information processing load, visual information had some influence to reduce prediction errors for the longer price series. The results of Experiment 3 showed that accuracy of predictions increased for less price volatility due to aggregation, whereas again there was no difference between five and 15 trading days. Purchase decisions resulted in better outcomes for the aggregated prices.

Investorś performance in stock markets may not improve by increasing the length of evaluation intervals unless the quality of the information is also increased. The results need to be verified in actual stock markets.

The results have bearings on the design of bonus systems.

The paper shows how stock price predictions and buying and selling decisions depend on amount and quality of information about historical prices.

Environmental pollution is defined, essentially, as the discharge by human action into the environment of something undesirable, for example, a gas, a chemical, oil, a noise. So the phrase ‘environmental pollution’ covers an immense variety of types of pollutant, an immense variety of types of environment polluted, an immense variety of consequences, and an immense variety of methods of investigation, monitoring and control. The subject is vast, fragmented, incoherent and expanding. So is its literature.

The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of consumers' erroneous affective self‐forecasts, and discuss the implications of such forecasts for consumer purchasing behaviour and marketing planning.

First, the literature on inaction inertia – the lowering of the likelihood that a bargain will be taken once a better bargain has been missed – is reviewed. Second, the literature on affective self‐forecasting is reviewed. Finally, the implications that the authors synthesis of the behavioural evidence carries for marketing are discussed.

The inaction inertia literature implicates the regret that consumers associate with purchasing a discounted item once they have missed a much larger discount on it as a major contributing factor to consumers' unwillingness to purchase the item on the second occasion. The literature on affective self‐prediction suggests that regret (and other emotions) is systematically mispredicted.

The likely effect of erroneously anticipated regret in inaction inertia situations is depressed purchasing behaviour. The paper argues that because affective anticipations are typically erroneous, their impact on consumer decision‐making processes cannot be deemed rational. It is proposed that marketing should intervene to either increase the accuracy of such anticipations, or to lead consumers to discount them.

Price promotions can have negative side effects, such as those observed in inaction inertia circumstances. To some extent, these are driven by consumers anticipated regret (and possibly other relevant emotions). Marketing techniques can counteract the disproportionate impact of such emotions.

The paper offers a synthesis of behavioural evidence on inaction inertia and affective self‐forecasting – two quite separate literatures that have yet to be brought together in the present context. In addition, the paper outlines implications for marketing and suggests possible strategies to moderate the discussed effects.

Consumer credit as a proportion of household debt has grown considerably during the last 20 years across many developed countries. A fairly extensive literature from the field of empirical psychology has provided evidence that personality factors and attitudes may influence individuals’ debt financing decisions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of attitude to credit and three main research questions are addressed. Is there any relationship between attitude and use of consumer credit? Are there any differences between the attitudes of credit users and non‐users that can be associated with motivations for using consumer credit? Does attitude towards credit affect preferences for the financing of consumption?

The authors provide answers based on the results of an original survey of the use of consumer credit conducted on a wide sample of Italian households, which allowed the authors to asses the respondents’ attitudes towards credit and to examine them with respect to credit decisions, controlling for several socio‐economic variables.

The findings indicate that the influence of attitude on consumer credit decisions cannot be ruled out. Attitude toward credit appears to play an important role and is significantly related to motivations for using credit and to the method of choice for financing consumption.

This study improves on most existing research on these topics in the particularly large size and scope of the sample, and also because several studies from the psychological field lack a thorough assessment of household economic conditions and expectations.

Information concerning the long‐term consequences of credit repayment decisions is often not available for flexible credit facilities such as credit cards. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of such information in repayment decisions. A dual mental accounting model of money management predicted that repayments would be influenced by both total cost and loan duration information. Experiment 2 also investigated the role of key economic and psychological factors, including some related to a risk defusing operator model of risk management.

In two questionnaire‐based experiments bank customers (n=241; 300) were presented with credit card and remortgage repayment scenarios. In both studies, total cost and loan duration information were varied in a 2×2 randomised‐groups factorial design.

In both studies, analysis of covariance showed that information on the long‐term consequences of repayment decisions lead to significantly higher levels of repayment. However, in Experiment 2, it was found using hierarchical multiple regression that disposable income, level of education, and the perception of, and worry about, repayment difficulties had larger significant effects on repayment levels.

The effects of long‐term consequence information were interpreted in terms of mental accounting and future‐oriented thinking. The effect of concern with future repayment difficulties suggests that borrowers choose lower repayments to control such risks.

Providing total cost and loan duration information for a range of repayment levels could help borrowers make better repayment decisions.

These novel findings contribute to our understanding of borrowers’ repayment behaviour.

A TRACE of acrimony has tinctured some recent letters published in these pages. The head and front of the offence seemed to be that the author of the first serious British book on work study failed to recognise the existence of the Institute of Industrial Technicians. Let us preserve a sense of proportion. At the worst it was probably no more than an oversight understandable enough in an author writing a technical work while immersed in the daily duties of his calling. Per se, the fact does not affect the Institute in the slightest degree.