  The price multiplier effect provides precious insight into the behavior of
investors during episodes of speculative trading. It tells us that the higher
the price of an asset is (within a set of similar assets) the more its price is
likely to increase during the upgoing phase of a speculative price peak. In
short, instead of being risk averse, as is often assumed, investors rather seem
to be ``risk prone''. While this effect is known to hold for several sorts of
assets, it has not yet been possible to test it for stocks because the price of
one share has no intrinsic significance which means that one cannot say that a
stock $ A $ is more expensive than a stock $ B $ on the basis of its price. In
this paper we show that the price-dividend ratio gives a good basis for
assessing the price of stocks in an intrinsic way. When this alternative
measure is used instead, it turns out that the price multiplier effect also
holds for stocks, at least if one concentrates on samples of companies which
are sufficiently homogeneous.
