Time and place: 27.11.2019 from 12:15 to 13:45, room F4090, WiWi2 building.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Christoph Merkle, Kühne Logistics University.

Title: Algorithm Aversion in Financial Investing

Prof. Dr. Christoph Merkle from the Kühne Logistics University will be our next guest lecturer at the Diginomics Brownbag seminar on Wednesday, November 27, 2019.  He will give a talk on the topic of "Algorithm Aversion in Financial Investing". Before Prof. Dr. Christoph Merkle joined the KLU, he was Professor of Finance and Banking at the University of Mannheim from 2012 to 2017, where he earlier received his PhD. His research interests include Behavioral Finance, Household Finance, Experimental Economics, Decision Research, and Digital Finance.

Further information about Prof. Dr. Christoph Merkle is available here.

A short introduction to the work that Prof. Dr. Christoph Merkle will be presenting can be found below:

The tendency of humans to shy away from using algorithms|even when algorithms observably outperform their human counterpart|has been referred to as algorithm aversion. We conduct an experiment to test for algorithm aversion in nancial decision making. Participants acting as investors can tie their incentives to either a human fund manager or an investment algorithm. We nd no sign of algorithm aversion: Investors care about returns, but do not have strong preferences which intermediary obtains these returns. Contrary to what has been suggested, investors are also not quicker to lose con dence in the algorithm after seeing it err. However, we nd that investors are unable to fully separate skill and luck when evaluating either intermediary.