Discussions on long-term financial choice

Kuan Kiat Cheah, F Douglas Foster, Richard Heaney, Timothy Higgins, Barry Oliver, Terry Oâ€™Neill and Roslyn Russell
Additional contact information
Kuan Kiat Cheah: Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
F Douglas Foster: UTS Business School, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Richard Heaney: University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia
Timothy Higgins: Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Barry Oliver: University of Queensland Business School, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Terry Oâ€™Neill: Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Roslyn Russell: RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Australian Journal of Management, 2015, vol. 40, issue 3, 414-434

Abstract: We analyse focus group discussions about long-run (retirement) financial decisions, and explore the extent to which participant responses are related to the oft-used behavioural explanations of financial choice. We find that persons of all ages understand the importance of long-term savings, but face many challenges in preparing for retirement. There is mixed support for a range of associated behavioural explanations. Complexity, relevance of decisions, and uncertainty come up repeatedly in all focus groups, irrespective of the age of the participants. The use of heuristics, confidence, costs of mistakes, mental accounting, and the importance of social interaction appeared of less immediate relevance to all groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for how the financial services and superannuation industries communicate with members. There appears to be a general view from the focus groups that breaking large, complex retirement decisions into more manageable pieces (based on personal circumstances) and providing more focused and relevant information to investors would result in more effort and care expended on retirement decisions.

Keywords: Financial choice; focus groups; retirement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0312896214532476 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ausman:v:40:y:2015:i:3:p:414-434

DOI: 10.1177/0312896214532476

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Australian Journal of Management from Australian School of Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().