Finanças comportamentais: um estudo da Teoria dos Prospectos com alunos de graduação de uma universidade pública do estado de Alagoas

Abstract

The objective of this work is to replicate the experiment conducted by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), on Behavioral Finance from the Prospect Theory, with students of undergraduate courses in Business Administration, Accounting and Economics from a public university in the state of Alagoas, seeking to analyze the influence of heuristics and behavioral biases of the decision process, observing the effects certainty, reflex and isolation in the face of possibilities of loss and exposure to risk. The research has a quantitative approach, descriptive in nature, and the survey method was used. The questionnaire adapted from Kahneman and Tversky's experiment (1979) and from the Brazilian articles cited was used, being applied to 123 students, distributed between the first and the tenth periods of the courses. The research universe was chosen due to the fact that the higher education courses in which the students are inserted, in theory, present greater potential for decision making in the scenario proposed by the research, for being introduced in the financial context. The results obtained in this research converge with the results obtained in the original research, even more than forty years after it was conducted. The conclusions reached in this research demonstrate the certainty, reflex and isolation effects in the respondents' choice process, being in accordance with the principles of Behavioral Finance and suggesting that such characteristics tend to remain in the long term.