Bibliometric analysis on the association between behavioral finance and decision making with cognitive biases such as overconfidence, anchoring effect and confirmation bias

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis on the association between the themes ‘behavioral finance’ and ‘financial and managerial decision making’, and the cognitive biases ‘overconfidence’, ‘anchoring effect’ and ‘confirmation bias’. The search for articles was performed at the Web of Science database using EndNote® as reference management software, and CiteSpace (Chen in Proc Natl Acad Sci 101(suppl 1):5303–5310, 2004; J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 57(3):359–377, 2006) as bibliometric analysis software. The search led to 889 articles published between 1990 and 2016, and the results have shown that the number of researches relating overconfidence, anchoring and confirmation biases to behavioral finances has been growing throughout time, mainly from 2008 on. Besides, the results have confirmed the importance of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman to this research field. The bias presenting the closest proximity to the behavioral finance field in the present study was overconfidence. The confirmation bias was the one presenting the smallest number of publications and the slightest relation to this study field, fact that opens a promising research field.