Conversational robo advisors as surrogates of trust: onboarding experience, firm perception, and consumer financial deci
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ORIGINAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Conversational robo advisors as surrogates of trust: onboarding experience, firm perception, and consumer financial decision making Christian Hildebrand 1
&
Anouk Bergner 1
Received: 6 August 2019 / Accepted: 13 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The current research demonstrates how conversational robo advisors as opposed to static, non-conversational robo advisors alter perceptions of trust, the evaluation of a financial services firm, and consumer financial decision making. We develop and empirically test a novel conceptualization of conversational robo advisors building on prior work in human-to-human communication and interpersonal psychology, showing that conversational robo advisors cause greater levels of affective trust compared to non-conversational robo advisors and evoke a more benevolent evaluation of a financial services firm. We demonstrate that this increase in affective trust not only affects firm perception (in terms of benevolence attributions or a more positively-valenced onboarding experience), but has important implications for investor behavior, such as greater recommendation acceptance and an increase in asset allocation toward conversational robo advisors. These findings have important implications for research on trust formation between humans and machines, the effective design of conversational robo advisors, and public policy in the digital economy. Keywords Roboadvisors . Chatbots . Consumer financial decisionmaking . Investment automation . Machine intelligence . Trust
Introduction Robo advisors have been praised as the next operating system in finance and the “new wealth management interface of the 21st century” (Andrus 2014). Robo advisors provide investment advice without the intervention of a human advisor. In short, robo advisors are digital interfaces that guide investors through an entirely automated process of investment advisory from assessing financial goals, evaluating consumers’ risk profile, and ultimately managing the entire portfolio (Faloon and Scherer 2017; Gomber et al. 2017; Williams-Grut 2017). While discretionary input from consumers is possible, the key Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-02000753-z. Martin Schreier served as Guest Editor for this article. * Christian Hildebrand [email protected] Anouk Bergner [email protected] 1
University of St. Gallen, TechX Lab HSG, Institute of Marketing, Dufourstrasse 40a, CH-9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland
property is the fully automated process of risk assessment, asset allocation, and portfolio management, consistent with consumers’ current financial situation, financial goals, and appetite for risk. Despite the increasing presence of robo advisors in the financial industry with a share of $200 billion in assets under management worldwide in 2017 (Euler 2018) and companies such as Betterment or Wealthfront accumulating $1 billion in assets under management in less than 2.5 years af
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