Demographics of self attribution bias in investment decision

Self attribution is a cognitive phenomenon which makes people attributes failures to situation factors and successes to dispositional factors. Most of the investors, while making investment decisions tend to resort to mental shortcut or Heuristics to arrive at the decision easily and quickly and are likely to fall prey to behavioral biases like self attribution bias. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether Indian Investors are susceptible to self attribution bias and identify the demographic groups which are more susceptible to it. The study employs primary data collected from a convenient sample of 428 investors with the help of a structured questionnaire. The survey was carried out in Indore city (in Central India) during July – October 2006. The results indicate that individual investors are likely to exhibit self attribution bias. The differences in proneness to self attribution bias were found to be insignificant among investors belonging to different income, education, gender and age but significant among investors of different occupations.