The Delegation of Investor Decision Making: What Drives Participants in Social Trading Networks to Engage in Copy Trading

Abstract

This study analyses existing literature to identify what drives participants in social trading networks to engage in copy trading. A concept-centric review of literature extracts recurring, relevant concepts and builds insights used to inform an Investor Engagement Framework which models the drivers of investor engagement in copy trading. It is considered that the underlying drivers of the Technology Acceptance Model alone aren’t adequate in describing what drives social trading participants to engage in copy trading. The addition of affect-based signals and cognition-based signal augments the model to reflect trustworthiness in social trading networks. These results firstly outline that the Technology Acceptance Model needed to be extended when applied to the context of copy trading within social trading networks. Secondly, the results suggest that for a participant in a social trading network to engage in copy trading, the investor they copy must provide affect-based and cognition-based signals of trustworthiness.