Selling Hope, Selling Risk

Reviews / Votes

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
"Provides excellent insight into the historical and current state of investor protection in the US. Summing up: Essential." --CHOICE
"Selling Hope, Selling Risk is a much-needed book on questions that affect all of us, and the global economy, worldwide: What is-and what should be-the nature of investor protection in investment markets, in which there are multifarious ways to make huge profits from taking advantage of the unwary."

-- George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001
"No one in the field is more respected than Donald Langevoort, and this book, a culmination of decades of work, does not disappoint. Its focus is on the dilemmas associated with investor protection. Nothing is as simple as it appears at first glance: Investors are imperfect, having strong biases and limited cognitive capacity; financial executives are not simply crooks (but still regularly mislead); and the SEC is somewhere in the uncertain zone between truly
"captured" and just "constrained." No easy answers thus emerge, but this is still the best roadmap available of the regulatory, legal and political choices involving disclosure and securities
regulation that now confront our country."

-- John C. Coffee, Jr., Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
"Can regulators save investors from themselves? In this fascinating book, Donald Langevoort eloquently shows how ego, loyalty, greed, dread of losses, and even notions of fairness distort the decisions of naive and sophisticated investors alike. By cracking open the minds that form financial markets, Langevoort masterfully reveals the challenges of well-intended regulators and the inescapable limits of investor protection."

-- Zohar Goshen, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School and Former Chairman of Israel Securities Authority
"Professor Langevoort's accessible and important book provides stunning insights into why the regulation of financial markets failed so conspicuously in the recent crisis and what can be done to prevent the disaster from happening again. The book vividly demonstrates the many ways in which behavioral theory can inform and improve our understanding of financial markets and institutions and our assessment of proposed reforms."

-- Geoffrey Parsons Miller, Stuyvesant Comfort Professor of Law, NYU Law School
"Like all of his work, Don Langevoort's new book, Selling Hope, Selling Risk, manages to synthesize research from psychology, economics, law and more, and deploy it to create a more robust understanding of markets and investor protection. The result is a fascinating and readable book that brings depth and richness to the discourse about regulation and why it often doesn't work or work as planned."

-- Hillary A. Sale, Washington University School of Law