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This paper provides a behavioral analysis of BP, whose capital budgeting decisions in the last decade have resulted in a series of high-profile accidents, including the worst environmental disaster in US history. This analysis uses BP as a vehicle to discuss the application of business processes and psychological pitfalls to analyze corporate culture. The paper identifies weaknesses and vulnerabilities in BP's culture, makes comparisons with the corporate financial practices at other firms, and offers suggestions about how BP can engage in debiasing. Notably, the paper also suggests that insufficient knowledge of behavioral decision making resulted in analysts, investors, and regulators attaching insufficient emphasis to the risks in BP's operations. The paper calls for more attention to the psychological aspects of corporate behavior by analysts, regulators, corporate managers, and academics.

I use five separate measures of deviation from Put-Call Parity of options on a stock without splits or dividends as separate negative measures for market efficiency. I rely upon the theory of trading volume as a function of short sales costs, etc., and that of market efficiency as a function of trading volume, etc. derived by Bhattacharya (2019). I use Three-Stage Least Squares (3SLS) to estimate this structural system, separately for Nasdaq and non-Nasdaq U.S. stocks. I find, contrary to much previous theoretical and empirical work, that the impact of short sales costs & constraints on market efficiency is not significantly negative and that the impact of trading volume on market efficiency is not significantly positive, and my results are robust to various econometric specifications and financial economic assumptions.