Behavioral Biases and Investment Decision-Making in the Indian Stock Market: The Moderating Role of Financial Literacy and Investor Experience

TL;DR

This study explores how behavioral biases affect investment decisions in the Indian stock market and how financial literacy and experience moderate these effects.

Contribution

The study identifies heuristics as a significant behavioral bias and examines the limited moderating role of financial literacy and experience.

Findings

Heuristics significantly influence investment decisions, while other biases like prospect theory and emotions do not.

Financial literacy and investor experience moderate the effects of emotions and market impact but not heuristics or herding behavior.

Improving education and experience may help reduce emotional and trend-based decisions but not instinctive biases.

Abstract

Investment decision making is a critical aspect of financial planning. It involves allocating the financial resources to various investment avenues with an objective of generating future returns. Behavioral finance provides a theoretical framework for understanding psychological biases investment decision making which changes the assumptions of traditional finance. This study examines five important behavioral biases such as heuristics, prospect theory, emotions, market impact, and herding behavior on investment decision-making and portfolio management by considering investor experience and financial literacy as moderating factors.

Primary data was collected from individual investors in the BSE and NSE using a structured questionnaire administered through a purposive random sampling. Resulting in 151 complete responses were obtained and were considered valid for the purpose of our study. PLS-SEM was used to test the proposed hypotheses as well as the moderating effect

Study finding indicates that heuristics have a positive and statistically significant effect on investment decisions, while prospect theory, emotions, market impact, and herding behavior showed no significant direct influence. The moderation analysis reveals that both investor experience and financial literacy significantly moderate the effects of emotions and market impact on investment decisions. However, their influence on heuristics, prospect theory, and herding behavior was statistically insignificant.

The results of this study lead to several conclusions. In this present study only one behavioral bias heuristics (HU) demonstrated a significant direct influence on investment decisions. In contrast, other behavioral biases such as prospect theory (P), emotions (E), market impact (M), and herding behavior (HB) do not significantly affect investment decisions (p > 0.05). The moderating effect of investors’ experience and financial literacy investor behavior are minimal. The result underscores that improving financial education, skills, knowledge and gaining experience may help investors regulate emotional and trend-based decisions but may not be sufficient to address more instinctive cognitive biases. The significance of the study provides important implications for financial educators, advisors, policymakers and stock market authorities regarding the need for behaviorally informed investor training, decision-support systems, and informed advisory services to promote rational investment behavior.

Figures