The Price of Luck
26 Pages Posted: 9 Jan 2015
Date Written: June 9, 2013
Abstract
We find that the vast majority of students taking an advanced undergraduate finance course show a preference for luck in a classroom experiment. In Phase I of the experiment part of the students, group A, were asked to guess a coin toss five times in a row. In Phase II the rest of the students, group B, were given 10 EUR to bet on some of the Group A students taking a second go at guessing a sequence of five coin tosses (Phase III). Group B students’ bets were by default allocated to the worse performing student in Phase I. Switching to better performing Group A students was costly. A total of 23 out of 28 students were willing to pay for switching and thus showed a preference for luck.
Keywords: Decision heuristics, hot hand fallacy, experiments
JEL Classification: C90, G02, G11
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation