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Assessing Innovation II: xDelia and How Emotions Affect Financial Decisions

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Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020, 12:46

Emotions and Finance

I chose to look at xDelia as another example I could use to test my judgment of how innovative a tool or project was.  xDelia is an open science project looking into how emotions affect financial decisions, with a mission to improve decision making so that future financial crises might be averted.   I am quite sure that this is a reference not only to individual, small scale decision making but also on the scale of the 2008 crisis, created by the poor decision making of the world's banks.  It is worth noting that some very brief research informs me that emotions are a psychophysiological process and that I found some research from the mid to late 20th century on the psychological factors in financial decision making, e.g. Slovic (1972).  We see studies of emotional factors in finance decisions appearing much more in the last two decades, e.g. Lund (2016) including of course by writers on the xDelia team (Peffer et al, e.g. 2012).  I judge the project to be innovative because it draws on open research and a contemporary research area (emotions and financial decision-making) and because of the multi-disciplinary nature of it (financial trading, quantitative finance, psychology of finance, learning technology design and evaluation, experimental psychology, neuroeconomics, experimental economics, physioeconomics, psychophysiology, sensor engineering, game development, and financial capability). The use of gaming is relatively new as a research technique and very likely the methods have been developed especially for this project. 



References
Lund, M. (2016) ‘Emotion often drives our financial decisions, even when logic should’, The Enterprise. Salt Lake City: Enterprise Business Newspaper Inc., 46(15), p. 15. Available at: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1843259448/.


Peffer et al. (2012) xDelia final report: emotion-centred financial decision making and learning. Open University, CIMNE.


Slovic, P. (1972). Psychological study of human judgment: Implications for investment decision making. The Journal of Finance27(4), 779-799.

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