The Information Behavior of Individual Investors in Saudi Arabia
THE INFORMATION BEHAVIOR OF INDIVIDUAL INVESTORS IN SAUDI ARABIA Nabil Mohammed Elwani, B.S., M.S. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2016 APPROVED: Shawne D. Miksa, Major Professor Victor R. Prybutok, Committee Member, Interim Dean of the College of Information Barbara Schultz-Jones, Committee Member Suliman Hawamdeh, Chair of the Department of Library and Information Sciences Costas Tsatsoulis, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Elwani, Nabil Mohammed. The Information Behavior of Individual Investors in Saudi Arabia. Doctor of Philosophy (Information Science), May 2016, 248 pp., 51 tables, 12 figures, references, 218 titles. Information plays a significant role in the success of investment strategies. Within a non- advisory context, individual investors elect to build and manage their investment portfolios to avoid the cost of hiring professional advisors. To cope with markets’ uncertainty, individual investors should acquire, understand, and use only relevant information, but that task can be affected by many factors, such as domain knowledge, cognitive and emotional biases, information overload, sources’ credibility, communication channels’ accuracy, and economic costs. Despite an increased interest in examining the financial performance of individual investors in Saudi Arabia, there has been no empirical research of the information behavior of individual investors, or the behavioral biases affecting the investment decision making process in the Saudi stock market (SSM). The purpose of this study was to examine this information behavior within a non-advisory contextualization of their investment decision-making process through the use of an online questionnaire instrument using close-ended questions. The significant intervening variables identified in this study influence the individual investors’ information behavior across many stages of the decision making process.
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