Individual Investor Decision Making-A Review Study

The smooth functioning of an economy largely depends on the investments made in it. There are number of investment vehicles operating in the economy for promoting its growth. Capital market is one among them, which mobilizes the savings of public to the corporate and Government that are in need of money. Apart from technical and fundamental factors, the demographic factors such as age, gender, income, educational qualifications etc., and behavioural factors such as attitudes, perception, beliefs etc., also plays a significant role in determining the investment behaviour of individual investors. In general, investors make decisions based on the information available but the processing of information varies as all the investors do not have similar psychological factors. The presence of these factors makes it difficult for stock market analysts to determine asset prices. Hence the present study is carried out with an aim to investigate the existing literature and identify the factors that affect the investor's decision making towards investment.