Economist--Stress testing(e-c)practice

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Economist--Stress testing(e-c)practice

Stress testing
压力测试


Apr 8th 2009

From The Economist print edition

The crisis is likely to make traders take riskier decisions to avoid losing money
危机可能让交易者冒更大风险回避损失


IT HAS long been known in financial markets that people are so reluctant to lose money that they will take big risks to avoid it. If you give the average person a 90% chance of winning a little money or a 10% chance of winning a lot, he will most likely take the option that offers him at least a little bit of cash. But offer him a 90% chance of losing a little money or a 10% chance of losing a lot, and he will opt for the latter. A recent study finds that stress exacerbates this.

  在金融市场久为人知的一个情况是人们十分不愿意损失金钱，以至于会冒很大风险去回避损失。如果你让一个普通人选择要么有90%赚一笔小数额钱的机会；要么有10%赚大钱的机会，他最有可能选择至少给他带来一点钱的那个选择。但是，让他选择90%损失一小笔数额金钱的机会；要么10%损失大笔金额的机会，那么他将会选择后者。最近的一项研究发现压力在加剧这一点。

Anthony Porcelli and Mauricio Delgado, psychologists at Rutgers University in New Jersey, set out to analyse the sorts of financial risks people were willing to take when calm or stressed. They knew finance could be stressful at the best of times. Stockbrokers, for instance, make important financial decisions in split seconds in conditions that are sometimes noisy, hot and socially tense, they noted in Psychological Science, a journal. Does this affect their judgment?

  来自新泽西州Rutgers大学的心理学家Anthony Porcelli 和Mauricio Delgado着手分析人们在平静和有压力时去冒的金融方面风险种类。他们知道金融在最佳时期也会产生压力。在Psychological Science期刊上，两人提到了，例如，股票经纪人在瞬时间、在有时候嘈杂、高温、社交活动密集的环境中就要做出重要的金融决定。这会影响到他们的判断吗？

The experiment involved students playing a gambling game. To stimulate stress, for part of the game half had their main hand in very cold water. The students faced financial decisions that varied in both the degree of risk and the amount of money that could be won or lost. They could choose between, say, an 80% chance of losing 75 cents and a 20% chance of losing $3 or an 80% chance of winning 75 cents and a 20% chance of winning $3. They could keep anything they won.

  试验是由学生们参加赌博游戏。为了增加压力，游戏部分过程，让他们的主用手放入很冷的水中。学生们面临的金融决定在风险风度和可能赢得或损失的金钱数目发生变化。譬如，他们可以选择：80%的损失几率，75美分，对20%的损失几率，3美元，或者，80%赚钱几率，75美分，对20%赚钱几率，3美元。学生可以自己保留赚来的钱。   

The psychologists found that exposure to stress led participants to choose riskier decisions when trying to decide between taking a minor loss or a major one. The reverse proved true with gains.

One potential explanation for the effect might be that the human brain has two ways of looking at the world, an analytical one and an intuitive one. The analytical one is more easily disrupted by outside stimuli, such as stress. The intuitive one cuts to the bottom line when times are tough.

  心理学家们发现暴露在压力下会导致在当面临微弱损失或重大损失时参与者做出更冒险的决定，而对于受益却相反。

  对这个影响的潜在解释也许是人类大脑看待世界有两个方式：分析，直觉。分析更容易受到外部刺激打扰，例如压力。当情况艰难，直觉就会给出底线。

Professional traders with years of experience should still make reasonable decisions when forced to respond to situations under stress since their intuitions are well honed. Thus, increasing stress should not disrupt their activities much as long as circumstances are not so unusual that they disturb their intuition.

  有多年经验的职业交易者们在被迫要处于压力下对情况做出响应时，应该还是能做出理智的决定，因为他们拥有训练有素的直觉。因此，只要环境不会太不寻常到干扰了他们的直觉，否则提高压力不应该会太多打扰他们的行为。

What is worrying is that today’s traders are in truly uncharted (and very cold) waters, and under such conditions, experience is little help; split-second decisions have to be taken that have never been encountered before. As a result, traders could be vulnerable to the phenomena seen in the study, says Valerie Reyna, co-director of the Centre for Behavioural Economics and Decision Research at Cornell University in New York. Ideally, one way for governments to improve the situation would be to give people a better sense of what is going wrong and how to fix it, explains Ms Reyna. Unfortunately, governments seem to be almost as disoriented as everyone else at the moment. So the traders are likely to take bigger risks to avoid loss, just like the students.

  令人担忧的是今天的交易者真正面临一个陌生（严峻）的情况，在这样的条件下，经验没有什么帮助；从未遇到过的瞬时的决定必须做出。根据来自纽约Cornell大学行为经济和决定中心的协助主任Valerie Reyna说， 结果，交易者们可能会受到在研究中表现出的现象的影响。Reyna女士解释到，理想的情况下，让政府改善这个局面的一个方法是让人们对什么出了错、如何弥补更多地了解。不幸地是，此刻，政府似乎和所有其它人一样摸不到方向。所以就和那些学生们一样，交易者们才有可能会去冒更大的风险回避损失。


注；原文出自economist