Price-end biases in financial products

Purpose - The paper seeks to show that marketing and psychology literature can shed light on why investors exhibit preferences for certain price ends. The perspective adopted is that the stock market is a marketplace in which investors, as consumers, buy and sell (i.e. exchange) financial products such as stocks. Design/methodology/approach - The paper analyzes trading data from the stock exchanges to empirically test propositions about investor behavior vis-a-vis certain price ends of interest derived from the marketing and psychology literature. Findings - Investors, as consumers, favor price-ends of 0 and 5 more than price-ends of 9, in that they trade more frequently and more aggressively at these price ends. Further, even price ends of 0 are favored more than odd price ends of 5. Practical implications - The results of the study shed light on how the cognitive bias of the consumer thwarts the otherwise efficient functioning of the financial market. Originality/value - The paper uses market-level data to gain insights into the cognitive process of the individual investor, in addition to teasing out specific biases that have not been identified earlier in the literature. It extends the study of consumer behavior to non-traditional, but consequential, marketplaces such as the stock market.