Research of students’ behavior in the financial market depending on the level of mathematical knowledge

Abstract

Introduction. Present scientific research resorts to experiments to identify the motives of a particular behavior, primarily in the financial sector. This article aims to reveal the dependence of students’ behavior in the simulated financial market on their level of mathematical knowledge. Materials and Methods. The data of the present study includes the results of an experimental session conducted among students of the economics program. At the first stage, a mathematical test was conducted with tasks of the school final exams. The second stage was a model of the financial market where participants could sell and buy shares in 10 rounds; at the end of the game, the incomes of the players were compared. Three mechanisms to analyze the obtained data were used. A cloud of players’ disposable funds distribution was constructed, along with income changes dynamics over time and the number of transactions in each round of the game. Next, correlation matrices were generated for the entire game and for its individual rounds. Finally, an econometric model was developed, with the player’s available funds as the explained variable and their score on a mathematical test as the regressor. Results and discussion. The results reveal that knowledge of mathematics can really influence income in the financial market, which is confirmed for our sample. The coefficient in the econometric model is significant at the 5% level and equals 48.84. In other words, an increase in a score in mathematics by 1 will entail an increase in the player’s income by 48.84 coins. The coefficient of determination is 0.15, which indicates the quality of the fit of the model at 15%. Considering that the analysis uses only one factor and does not take into account other aspects that could affect the behavior of players in the market, this is a fairly high value. Conclusion. The authors came to the conclusion that students demonstrate differences in income received in the financial market model, which, among other things, may be due to different levels of mathematical knowledge. Mathematical knowledge means the skills to use logical construction and more accurate forecasting, the probabilities of events. In the future, it is planned to scale the experiment for a larger sample and increase the representativeness of the results.

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