Finanças comportamentais: estudo de atitudes, crenças, valores e vieses em decisões financeiras de estudantes de agronomia e pós-graduandos em uma universidade pública brasileira

Abstract

Decisions involving financial aspects are complex considering that money has several meanings and multiple representations which vary from person to person and across cultures. Such complexity has aroused the interest of researchers in investigating people's attitudes and behaviors in relation to money and their financial choices. Several studies aimed to analyze the biases present in the decision making of students at different levels, undergraduate, graduate and specialization students. However, no studies were found in the literature review that analyzed the association between cognitive biases and the person's financial behavior over time, as well as those that studied students of the Agronomy course, which trains actors and potential investors in Brazilian agribusiness, one of the most important economic sectors in the country. Thus, given the importance of the topic, aiming to contribute to the field of Behavioral Finance and Economic Psychology, the present work aims to identify whether the Certainty Effect, Reflection Effect and Isolation Effect biases are present in the financial decision-making of students (undergraduates of the degree in Agronomy and graduates in Agronomy who are doing postgraduate studies) from a Brazilian public university, and whether it is possible to observe associations between their financial behavior, profile and the possible existence of these biases in their decision-making. For this, a quantitative exploratory-descriptive field research was carried out, through the application of a survey to the students. The collected data were processed in Excel and IBM SPSS software and analyzed using descriptive statistics, application of Pearson's Chi-square test of independence and adherence, Fisher's exact test, Phi coefficient analysis, Cramer's V statistics and adjusted residual. From the results, the tested hypotheses proved to be consistent with the theoretical survey, thus, it is concluded that for the studied sample, the certainty effect, reflection effect and isolation biases are present in the students' decision making, and that in such a way , these do not act in a strictly rational way, and their preferences are not always supported only by their assigned utility. In addition, the behavioral biases in analysis present in the students' choices are dependent on gender, financial experience/knowledge, income origin, family experience and financial references over time. In summary, it is understood that this work contributes to the expansion of the debate in the field of Behavioral Finance and to the public studied, as it presents implications on the behavioral aspects that can influence their financial decision-making.