Empowering investors with social annotation when saving for retirement

Junius Gunaratne, Jeremy Burke, Oded Nov

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Financial prospectuses, which are available to consumers who buy financial products, are intended to help inform decision-making. While prospectuses provide a wealth of information, they are complex and difficult to understand for the vast majority of their intended readers. To help nonexperts make informed decisions, we investigated how social annotations with comparative statements embedded into online prospectuses influence users' decisions and perceptions about decisions. We recruited 31 pre-study users to annotate 10 retirement saving plan prospectuses. We then embedded these annotations in prospectuses provided to another set of 228 users (147 novices and 81 experts) in a 35-period retirement saving simulation. Novices benefited from exposure to social annotations, and were more likely to meet their retirement saving goals than those not exposed to annotations. Exposure to social annotations brought novices' performance level to that of experts, but at the same time, led them to lower perceived understanding of the prospectus.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1066-1081
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343350
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 25 2017
Event2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017 - Portland, United States
Duration: Feb 25 2017Mar 1 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period2/25/173/1/17

Keywords

  • Behavior change
  • Decision making
  • Personal finance
  • Retirement saving
  • Social annotation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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