Do teams alleviate or exacerbate behavioral biases? Evidence from extrapolation bias in mutual funds

Authors Barahona, Cassella, Jansen
Year 2021
Type Working Paper
Abstract Whether teams attenuate or exacerbate the behavioral biases which are pervasive at the individual level is an open question. To address this question, we use the mutual fund industry as a laboratory. Our focus is on how return extrapolation is transmitted from individual fund managers to the team-managed funds they join. We show that teams heavily attenuate the influence of extrapolation bias on funds' trading behavior. Additional analysis reveals that this attenuation is not due to differences in investment experience, compensation contracts, workload, and investment styles between solo-managed and team-managed funds. Rather, our evidence suggests that the elicitation of team members' inner cognitive reflection can be responsible for teams' reduction in behavioral biases. Our results highlight the attenuation of the extrapolation bias as a potential benefit of team-based asset management.
Keywords Behavioral biases, extrapolation, heuristics, mutual funds, teams
URL https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3783421
Tags Archival Empirical  |   Asset Pricing, Trading Volume and Market Efficiency  |   Investment Decisions (Institutional)  |   Manager / Firm Behavior  |   Theory