Thought you needed something silly like money to buy a house? Maybe not. Kyle MacDonald at One Red Paperclip is bartering his way there. He started with a paperclip and has traded his way up to the current one of one afternoon with Alice Cooper, and it appears he’s about to reveal what he’s traded that for, soon. The reason I say it’s advertising is that I think there’s a bit of trading-for-fame aspect to this; otherwise, people wouldn’t have traded up for a doorknob, or a fish pen. As the site gets more exposure, the incentive to trade more high-value items might be higher. I haven’t figured out how he selects his next trading item, but as he’s trained as a journalist, I’d guess it’d have to be fodder for a good story!
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jshri
Precisely when it comes to capital markets and investments, it is obviously investors who come to the big picture. Strategies come next. Considering retail investors who are also large numbers, the individual psychology does play a phenomenal role. Behavioral finance! – Yes, the field captures it all. To study investors’ behavior, what else but experiments can capture behavior explicitly? Taking one dimension of risk perception for example, there are a range of factors affecting behavior right from personality to knowledge level and information processing levels. To study the effects of these psychological variables, cleverly designed experiments can do much to capture reality more than a survey or a model. The mentality of the finance group has all along forsaked the role of psychology, and if this role is appropriately accomodated ( which ought to be), experiments can help in a big way!