Regulating Robo Advice Across the Financial Services Industry

Automated financial product advisors – “robo advisors” – are emerging across the financial services industry, helping consumers choose investments, banking products, and insurance policies. Robo advisors have the potential to lower the cost and increase the quality and transparency of financial advice for consumers. But they also pose significant new challenges for regulators who are accustomed to assessing human intermediaries. A well-designed robo advisor will be honest and competent, and it will recommend only suitable products. Because humans design and implement robo advisors, however, honesty, competence, and suitability cannot simply be assumed. Moreover, robo advisors pose new scale risks that are different in kind from that involved in assessing the conduct of thousands of individual actors. This essay identifies the core components of robo advisors, key questions that regulators need to be able to answer about them, and the capacities that regulators need to develop in order to answer those questions. The benefits to developing these capacities almost certainly exceed the costs, because the same returns to scale that make an automated advisor so cost-effective lead to similar returns to scale in assessing the quality of automated advisors

Descripción de una nueva especie del género Arganiella Giusti y Pezzoli, 1980 (Mollusca, Gastropoda, Hydrobiidae) en la Península Ibérica

10 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables.[EN] A new species of Arganiella Giusti & Pezzoli, 1980, up to now a monotypic genus, thought to be endemic to the Italian Central Apennines, is described from the Iberian Peninsula. This new species, named Arganiella tartessica, is located in southwestern Spain, provinces of Huelva and Badajoz. In this paper, a detailed description of its morphological characters is given and new data of nervous system and ciliated areas in the cephalic region are provided.[ES] Se describe una especie ibérica de Arganiella Giusti y Pezzoli, 1980, un género que hasta ahora se consideraba monotípico y endémico de los Apeninos centrales italianos. Esta nueva especie, denominada Arganiella tartessica, ha sido localizada en el sureste español, en las provincias de Huelva y Badajoz. En este artículo se describen en detalle sus caracteres morfológicos y se presentan datos, hasta la fecha desconocidos en el género Arganiella, del sistema nervioso y de áreas ciliadas en la región cefálica.This work was funded by the “Fauna Ibérica” Project (DGES PB95–0235).Peer reviewe

A New Method of Measuring Online Media Advertising Effectiveness: Prospective Meta-Analysis in Marketing

The authors introduce a new method, prospective meta-analysis in marketing (PMM), to estimate consumer response to online advertising on a large and adaptive scale. They illustrate their approach in a field study in the U.S., China and the Netherlands, covering equivalent ad content on social media, online video, display banner, and search engines. The authors tested a conceptual framework based on attention and engagement using a technological solution that allow them to observe participants browsing and clicking activity in depth from their own residences, offices, or places of choice to use the tested media platforms, e.g., Facebook, Weibo, Google, Baidu and others. The authors show how consumers respond differently to the same ad depending on how distant they are from purchase, and uncover which channels are most appropriate to which user at different stages of the funnel. They also show how engagement and attention strengthen consumer response to advertising. The authors show how PMM produces exploratory findings, confirmatory findings, and replications by systematically organizing the incremental exploration of complex phenomena with cycles of discovery and validation

Consumers’ evaluation of allocation policies for scarce health care services: Vested interest activation trumps spatial and temporal distance

The allocation of scarce health care service resources often requires trade-offs between individual and collective outcomes (e.g., when some individuals benefit more strongly from a given policy th

Situation variation in consumers' media channel consideration

Situation Variation in Consumers' Media Channel Consideration, Sonja Wendel, Benedict G.C. Dellaert, Maastricht University The authors investigate consumers' consideration of media channels during different usage situations. They develop a model that explains consumers' media channel consideration as a function of the media channel's perceived benefits. In addition, they hypothesize that the usage situation affects consumers' media channel consideration and that situation-based benefit requirements moderate the effect of the benefits on their channel consideration. The hypothesized relationships are tested using survey data on consumers' consideration of 12 different media channels used by manufacturers to communicate product information across three product-related usage situations. The results support the proposed model structure and confirm the expected relationships

Consumer Preferences for Mass Customization

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Marketing Science Institute (grant#