Abstract:
Two aspects of social context are central to the finance industry: (i) financial professionals make investment decisions for customers and (ii) social competition/rankings are a pervasive feature. We link both lines of literature to investigate professionals' risk-taking behavior when investing funds for clients. We run online and lab-in-the-field experiments with 965 financial professionals and collect survey evidence from 1,349 respondents. We find that rankings drive professionals' investment behavior: those lagging behind increase risk-taking, but this effect disappears as soon as professionals' incentives are flat. Moreover, we show that professionals' preferences for high rank are stronger than for the general population.
