Characteristics of a good advice giver and the impact of financial incentives and competition on advice quality and advisors’ confidence

The Judge-Advisor System (JAS) highlights the importance of advice within the decision making process. Past JAS literature has focused on ways in which to improve advice utilisation and clients’ decision outputs. The aim of this thesis was to focus on an under researched area within the JAS literature: the advice giver. It predominantly aimed to explore three main input areas in relation to what makes a good advice giver: characteristics of the advice giver, the quality of advice, and how the advice is given. It began by identifying individuals’ implicit understanding of what characteristics are important for a good advisor. A three-factor framework was developed, which relates to advisors’ affect, behaviour, and cognition. Further, it explored whether two external motivators (the type of advisors’ financial incentive and competition between advisors) impacted advice quality (the accuracy of recommendations, amount of advice provided, and amount of information acquired) and how the advice is given (how confident the advisor appeared to their client). The type of advisors’ financial incentive impacted advisors’ input within an estimation task, but was not consistent within a choice task. Competition alone was found to have no impact on the advisors’ input. When competition and the advisors’ incentive (financial or quality) were explored together, competition, not the advisors’ incentive, impacted advice quality. A combination of both competition and a financial incentive was found to increase advisors’ public confidence. Finally, as advice-giving is an interactive process, the impact on the client was also explored. Clients’ ratings of their advisors’ trustworthiness were found to predict advice utilisation which increased clients’ decision accuracy but did not predict clients’ decision confidence. The thesis has begun to explore optimal characteristics of good advice givers and how external factors influence advisors’ inputs. Implications of the findings are discussed.