Do Commissions and Boni affect advisor behaviour?

Modern households have a great responsibility to deal with their own saving and investment decisions. Unfortunately, since the financial market has become more sophisticated and financial products more complex, investors usually lack the knowledge to meet these challenges. Therefore, they increasingly rely on experts help to make investment decisions. The information asymmetries, paired with the fact that financial advisors mostly rely on incentive pay as their main source of income, can lead to inefficies in those markets, if those incentive payments truely distort advisors' recommendations. In order to test, first, whether advisors are receptive to different forms of incentive pay, and second, which of the two instruments is more effective in distorting advice, I conduct an online experiment which is presented in this book.

Autorentext

Thomas Rittmannsberger was born in Amstetten, Austria. After attending school he moved to Innsbruck to study International Business and Sports Science. While working as a snowboard freestyle coach for the Austrian Ski Federation he started his Masters Degree in Applied Economics and graduated in Spring 2019.