Can simulated experience be harnessed to help people make investment decisions?

Abstract

To make profitable investment decisions, investors must know and understand their risks. They can learn about these risks in different ways. Evidence suggests that investors who learn from a ‘risk tool’ simulator perceive financial risk more accurately, feel more informed and confident, and thus take on more financial risk. We attempt a conceptual replication of these findings, exploring whether they extend from kind to wicked environments and to investors with some investment experience. We conducted four studies online, amounting to 3,804 participants, and observe that neither the risk tool nor any of the other risk communication interventions lead to different risk taking or to different subjective representations of risk relative to a control condition in which participants received no intervention. We evaluated several moderators, but none could explain the absence of an intervention effect, suggesting that the effect of risk tools and other interventions could be limited.

Keywords

• risk tool
• risk simulator
• decisions from experience