Mohanty, an assistant professor of marketing and international business, co-authored a paper on adoption of robo-advisors in the financial context which was presented at the American Marketing Association Winter Academic Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
Assistant Professor of Marketing Smaraki Mohanty co-authored a paper with Iman Paul from Montclair University, Yakov Bart from Northeastern University and Nirajana Mishra from Yale University on the adoption of robo-advisors in the financial context, which was presented at the 2023 AMA Winter Academic Conference in Nashville, Tennessee on Saturday, Feb. 11.
The research examined why despite some inherent and strong advantages offered by robo-advisors, most retail investors choose to engage traditional human investors over robo-advisors. Financial investment decisions are highly consequential in nature and hence most consumers delegate a lot of the responsibility of making investment decisions to the financial advisors. They argued that investors perceive robo-advisor to possesses low agentic mind and hence are not able to attribute responsibility of their investment decisions to robo-advisor as much as they are able to do so with traditional human advisors. Thus, this lowered the investor’s willingness to engage with robo-advisory services.
The current work thus identifies a potential reason by incorporating prior scholarship of mind perception and attribution of responsibility that might prevent consumers from adopting robo-advisory services. Along with that, this research also provides managers with techniques and simple changes in framing and positioning of the advisory services which could make robo-advisory services more appealing to the potential consumers.
They plan to expand this research by collecting more evidence from the real-world and publishing their work in the top journals of marketing and psychology.