Heuristics, Investments and Planning Among Young Investors of India

A heuristic is a Greek word meaning ‘to discover'. The paper aims to assess the influence of heuristics on the investors' investment decision making by analysing the effect of four heuristic biases, i.e., anchoring, availability, representativeness and overconfidence bias in the context of Mumbai Stock Markets. Active young investors in the Mumbai stock markets constitute population of this study. Considering the nature of population, convenient sampling has been used. The study applied quantitative and qualitative approaches to study the influence of four heuristics (anchoring, availability, representativeness and overconfidence) on investors' stock buying decisions. The data has been collected through a self- constructed questionnaire from investors in Mumbai stock exchanges. An items' descriptive analysis is conducted as a primary analysis technique to explain the most frequent responses of the investors to different aspects of the heuristics; and in order to support the findings from the descriptive analysis, correlation analyses have been used as supplementary approach.&nbsp