Financial Advisors and Their Clients: Information Search and Portfolio Choice Among Bank Customers

Bank customers are not financial experts, and yet they make high-stakes decisions that can substantively affect personal wealth. This raises questions about how non-experts actually make financial decisions. How do investors search for information? How does the information they look up map into decisions? Using data collected from financial advisors and bank customers at several branches of an Italian mutual bank, this paper aims to reveal new insights about the decision processes of average investors: their investment goals, the information sets they consider, and the factors that ultimately influence decisions about investment products. We designed four portfolio choice tasks based on data collected directly from financial advisors and their clients. Our subjects were actual bank customers with investment accounts at those banks containing 40,000 euro or more. Most subjects used a limited set of information, ignoring factors that conventional economic models usually assume drive investor behavior. We suggest that non-compensatory decision-tree models, which make no trade-offs among investment features, be considered as parsimonious descriptions of investor behavior useful in marketing applications and policy contexts alike.