User Heterogeneity in Trading Systems: Assessing Trader´s Market Predisposition via Personality Questionnaires

One of the main objectives facing service designers is presenting users with information from which to base their decisions. While traditional service research often emphasizes understanding of end users from a technology acceptance perspective, it fails to consider the individual economic dimensions of interactions within a system as in electronic markets. We study market participants from an individual perspective who interact in a repeated decision-making environment that closely resembles decision-making in financial markets. In contrast to financial markets (i) the outcome of events in our market is finally known and (ii) we can ex-post measure the participants´ trading performance. In our field study with nearly 2,000 active traders and over 215,000 single trading decisions we analyze the impact of emotion regulation, cognition and risk on trading behavior and performance. Our analysis indicates a significant user heterogeneity, which suggests individualizing future market experiences.