Mental Models of the Stock Market*

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Andre, Peter; Schirmer, Philipp; Wohlfart, Johannes
• 署名单位: Goethe University Frankfurt; University of Bonn; University of Cologne
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjag039
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: expectations; returns; WEALTH; POLICY

摘要

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations is not well understood. This article explores economic agents' mental models of what drives returns. We survey the general population, retail investors, financial professionals, and academic experts to investigate how they forecast and explain future returns in scenarios with stale news about future company earnings. We find that investors strongly disagree in their forecasts and reasoning. Most academic experts view markets as efficient. By contrast, most households express a perspective we call expected earnings reasoning: they directly equate higher expected earnings with higher expected returns. Professionals are split between market efficiency, mispricing, and expected earnings reasoning. In detailed experiments, we dissect why households adopt expected earnings reasoning. We show that it arises from inattention to how stock price changes affect investor costs-that is, how much investors must pay to acquire a claim to future cash flows-because the typical format and context of investment problems obscure these cost implications. Our results help connect a series of previously documented anomalies in expectation and trading data and highlight the importance of selective attention and context in shaping reasoning and belief formation.