Taming the bias zoo

The success of behavioral economics has led to a new challenge-many biases offering observationally similar predictions for a targeted financial anomaly.To tame this bias zoo, we combine subjective survey responses with observational data to propose a new approach, one that is robust to question-specific biases introduced through surveys.We illustrate this approach by administering a nationwide survey of Chinese retail investors to elicit their trading motives.In cross-sectional regressions of respondents' actual turnover on survey-based trading motives, perceived information advantage and gambling preference dominate other motives, even though they are not the most prevalent biases simply based on survey responses.