Mental accounting, for instance, helps explain investors' well-known tendency to sell winners too early and to hold on to losers too long--because we don't treat gains or losses as real until we actually sell the stock.

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Profits (or earnings), for instance, are largely an accounting concept that can easily be massaged by clever finance directors.

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For instance, there are no accounting rules for Enron-style investment partnerships.

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The savings-and-loans mess in America, for instance, was prolonged by easy accounting rules that allowed overly optimistic estimates of the industry's solvency.

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For instance, the recent guideline on fair-value accounting, which decrees that companies must show equity holdings at their market value, also contains a provision that allows them to avoid writing down shares if they think that they will soon recover in value.

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The number of Dutch citizens holding a second nationality, for instance, almost tripled to 1.2m between 1995 and 2010, with newborns accounting for a significant share of the growth.

ECONOMIST: Dual citizenship