Paul Grayson
Research student
You can email Paul Grayson directly; but for media enquiries please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations team.
Biography
Paul’s academic background is experimental psychology, studying for a BA in Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford and an MSc in Evolutionary Psychology at Liverpool. In between these degrees he worked for the accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP auditing financial institutions in the City of London, where he also qualified as a chartered accountant with the ICAEW.
Current research
Emotion and financial decision making
Paul’s research is in behavioural economics, the study of how psychology can explain economic decisions, particularly focussing on deviations in decision making from predictions of neo-classical economics. Paul is especially interested in emotions as a source of these deviations, and whether insights from the emotion regulation literature can be applied to improve the decisions which people make.
His thesis concerns the disposition effect, an investment bias where investors are quick to sell winning investments, and more likely to hold investments which are at a loss. This can be problematic as it may produce a distribution of returns with small gains but a large range of losses. He hopes to demonstrate whether emotions are involved in the production of this bias, and whether emotion regulation techniques can reduce or eliminate it.
He also works as a research associate on the xDelia project, a collaboration between researchers at the Open University and 6 other european partners. The xDelia project is also concerned with alleviation of the disposition effect, by developing serious games which can be used to teach people how to regulate their emotions. www.xdelia.org/
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