Sharing behaviour of bitcoin investors - evidence of confirmation bias?
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Author
Date
2015
Department
Major/Subject
Rahoitus
Finance
Finance
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
50
Series
Abstract
Confirmation bias is a cognitive fallacy that can lead investors to make wrong decisions. It affects how one interprets, searches and recalls information. Yet there is lack of research on how confirmation bias influences information sharing behaviour. Do people share more readily news or information that is closer to their beliefs? I investigate the sharing (retweeting) behaviour of bitcoin media followers. I further assume that bitcoin investors belong to a subset of bitcoin media followers. I find evidence that retweeting behaviour of positive and negative sentiment news is related to bitcoin price changes on a weekly level. When price goes up bitcoin investors tend to share more positive news and when price goes down relatively more negative news are shared. I also investigate the long term sharing tendency and find that on average bitcoin investors tend to share equal amounts of positive and negative news. I argue that this sharing behaviour is a demonstration of confirmation bias influencing information sharing behaviour.Description
Keywords
confirmation bias, information sharing, Twitter, bitcoin, sentiment analysis, cognitive bias
