The insurance by my side : better risk assesment for smarter isurance decisions

Insurance customers are not experts in risk management, and yet they make high-stakes decisions that can substantially affect their personal wealth and health. This raises questions about the strategies people use when they look for information or for professional advice. We interviewed 20 advisors and 99 customers of an Italian cooperative bank where insurance and financial products are retailed. We analyzed different aspects of interactions between customers and advisors that contribute to the communication of expert knowledge, the formation of trust, and the adoption of advice-taking heuristics. Customers considered their advisor’s communication style when deciding how much they should trust and delegate. The communication style also influenced the customers’ perceptions of risk and uncertainty of future events. Preliminary results reveal that the customers trusted their advisors very much because they judged the environment to be friendly; they developed this trust by adopting simple adaptive heuristics. Clients inferred the professional ability of their advisors by relying much more on so-called “honest” social signals than on content-related features. Methodologies to enhance customers’ decision-making outcomes based on better risk communication with adequate numerical and statistical evidence are also illustrated