Information Acquisition and Financial Advice

This paper studies the interplay between the investor’s incentives to delegate her asset allocation choice to a biased financial advisor, and the advisor’s decision to acquire information about multiple characteristics of the risky asset. We show that, to prevent unprofitable investments, the investor may delegate to the advisor imposing a cap on the amount of wealth that the advisor can invest. This cap (i) is decreasing in the magnitude of the conflict of interests between the investor and the advisor and (ii) may be lower when the advisor possesses more information. Interestingly, although the investor always prefers a more-informed advisor, the advisor may choose not to acquire full information, and reducing the conflict of interests with the investor may actually induce the advisor to acquire less information.