Abstract

The current wave of digitalization forces companies to adapt their offline activities to meet con-temporary customer expectations and technological possibilities. One current challenge for the financial services sector is to shift its traditional, in-person advisory process into a digital, au-tomated service (i.e., robo-advisory) to reduce costs as well as to reach a wider audience of prospective customers. By neglecting to increase and invest their savings, customers run the risk of making suboptimal economic decisions that may negatively affect their economic futures. Drawing on social response as well as anchor-adjustment theory, we investigate anthropomor-phism (i.e., the attribution of human characteristics and goals to non-human agents) and per-sonalized anchors in recommendations as IS design elements in the context of robo-advisory for investment decisions. Our results from an online experiment with 278 participants show that an-thropomorphism (i.e., triggered by verbal and visual cues) and personalized anchors in recom-mendations lead to higher social presence which in turn lead to increased investment volumes. Additionally, we demonstrate that personalized anchors in recommendations directly increase investment volume. Thus, our results contribute by providing novel findings on how anthropo-morphism and personalized anchors in recommendations can be used to improve economic de-cision-making.

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