Behavioral Finance in Cryptocurrency Perpetual Futures and Swaps: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This review synthesizes the emerging literature on behavioral finance in cryptocurrency perpetual futures and perpetual swaps. It uses a constrained systematic review of accessible repositories, publisher pages, and citation trails for studies published or posted from January 2021 to April 2026. The synthesis separates 13 direct perpetual-futures studies from 6 adjacent behavioral studies that inform interpretation. The central question is how behavioral mechanisms shape trading, pricing, and market quality in perpetual futures markets. The strongest direct evidence concerns speculative demand and basis risk, leverage choice and liquidation risk, funding-rate carry and arbitrage behavior, informed trading and market quality, and exchange-design effects across centralized and decentralized venues. Direct evidence on classic behavioral constructs such as fear of missing out, overconfidence, disposition effects, and learning remains sparse in perpetual-specific settings. Three conclusions stand out. First, perpetuals are behaviorally distinctive because funding fees, leverage, mark-to-market margining, and auto-liquidation create a high-frequency feedback system between prices and trader positions. Second, the strongest causal evidence indicates that perpetual contracts increase spot-market trading volume but worsen adverse-selection conditions when informed trading rises around funding windows. Third, exchange design matters because inverse, linear, quanto, oracle-priced, and VAMM-based contracts expose traders to different incentives and liquidation dynamics. The most important research gaps concern trader-level identification, CEX-DEX comparisons using comparable data, contract-type heterogeneity, and causal tests of leverage-rule changes.