Behavioural Finance and Malaysian Culture

Abstract

This paper examines how gender, religion, and ethnic differences influence the key determinants of individual investment behavior, which are risk taking, skill, luck, happiness, maximization, regret, confidence and trust. We find that gender difference is significantly associated with risk taking behavior and maximization as well as overconfidence. Religious beliefs and ethnic origins significantly affect life time income risk, regret, maximization, happiness, confidence and trust. However, the addition of these, Malaysian have relatively high level of regret and risk taking propensity in portfolio, and low level of maximization, happiness and general risk taking behavior than non Malaysian.