 Investor information searchCäzilia Loibl and Tahira K. Hira Journal of Economic Psychology, 2009, vol. 30, issue 1, 24-41 Abstract: Few will disagree that information search is essential in making investment decisions, a high-consequence decision task. Yet, the sources of investor information have never been used as a segmentation base to study investment behavior. We analyze survey results of investors in the US using information search, demographic, psychological, and involvement variables. Cluster analysis shows five typologies for investor information search based on sources of information. We also discover the majority of investors perform moderate- to low-information gathering strategies. The 11 demographics variables were insufficient to describe the typologies, although we did find higher-educated male investors with higher earnings more likely to practice a high-information search strategy, confirming previous studies. Turning to the psychological and involvement variables, we develop distinct typologies and identify several significant predictors for the five investor groups. For the majority of investors, investment decisions present a considerable and unwillingly undertaken challenge, and this study concludes with a discussion of how to target these investor typologies with approaches grounded in behavior-change theory. Keywords: Information; search; Investments; Involvement (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:30:y:2009:i:1:p:24-41 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.