Evaluating the role of external information on the choice of weights for aggregating judgments in groupdecisionmaking: the impact of f inancial education on investors’ choices

During the last few decades, the attention to Financial Education has produced a growing interest to explore the link between Financial Literacy and Financial Behaviour. However, the first consequence of this attention is that there is no clear definition of Financial Literacy. Moreover, the review of the literature on this topic shows a fragmentation, and this has prevented the formulation of a unified point of view on Financial Literacy and investors’ behaviour relation. For these reasons, this topic requires new and deeper studies. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model to study if financial education and Financial Literacy influence the diversification strategies in financial choices. Following the model suggested by Rossi et al. (Int J Anal Hierarchy Process 12(2) 2020), for evaluating an investment choice, we analyse three criteria: the return of the stock market, the performance of government bonds and the calendar effects in the financial markets. Then, in order to test the impact of Financial Education on decision-making investors’ process, we submitted a questionnaire to three groups of operators with different levels of financial education. Since group membership may affect the investment choice, we consider external information Takane and Shibayama (Psychometrika 56(1):97–120, 1991) to compute a set of suitable weights and aggregate individual judgments in a common group preference matrix according to the procedure introduced by Amenta et al. (Euro J Oper Res 288(1):294-301, 2021). The analysis takes into account this information and produces three different priority vectors: the first one concerns the global analysis, the second one shows the ranking due to membership to the different groups and the last one represents what cannot be explained by external information.