Behavioral Finance

Classical finance assumes investors are rational utility-maximizers; this course is about what happens when you drop that assumption and treat markets as the aggregate behavior of psychologically real people who anchor, frame, overreact, and feel. You'll work through the canonical machinery (expected utility, efficient markets, asset pricing) alongside the experimental results that broke it — prospect theory, heuristics, overconfidence — and write five reflection papers tying these biases to actual investor and managerial decisions. It sits downstream of intro finance and corporate finance, and is the natural lens for anyone heading toward investment management, trading, or corporate decision-making where the textbook "rational agent" stops predicting what people actually do.