How Can Robot Investment Assistant Help: Collecting Information or Providing Advice? Evidence from China

摘要

Robot investment assistants (RIAs) are designed to help individual investors with investment decisions by providing information and advice services. Using account level data between 2020 and 2021 from the largest mutual fund investment platform in China, we examine the values of different RIA services. Higher usage of RIAs is associated with higher future raw and risk-adjusted returns, higher diversification, risk-taking, and turnover for individual investors. We further find advice services, rather than information services, are playing a more important role in investors’ future returns and trading activities. We find no definite evidence that existing RIA services alleviate behavioral biases. (Presented at China International Conference in Finance (CICF) 2022, Joint Conference on Statistics and Data Science (JCSDS) 2023, FinTech Seminar Series at Peking University.)