The influence of upward social comparison on retail trading behaviour.

Online investing is often facilitated by digital platforms, where the information of peer top performers can be widely accessible and distributed. However, the influence of such information on retail investors' psychology, their trading behaviour and potential risks they may be prone to is poorly understood. We investigate the impact of upward social comparison on risk-taking, trading activity and investor satisfaction using a tailored experiment with 807 experienced retail investors trading on a dynamically evolving simulated stock market, designed to systematically measure various facets of trading activity.

Robo-investment aversion.

In five experiments (N = 3,828), we investigate whether people prefer investment decisions to be made by human investment managers rather than by algorithms ("robos"). In all of the studies we investigate morally controversial companies, as it is plausible that a preference for humans as investment managers becomes exacerbated in areas where machines are less competent, such as morality. In Study 1, participants rated the permissibility of an algorithm to autonomously exclude morally controversial stocks from investment portfolios as lower than if a human fund manager did the same; this finding was not different if participants were informed that such exclusions might be financially disadvantageous for them.