Una proposta di revisione dei questionari per la profilatura della cientela

This paper is aimed at proposing a review of the questionnaires currently employed in Italy to assess personal financial profiles of retail investors. In fact, current questionnaires are neither an effective strategic tool for intermediaries nor a reliable customer protection device for clients: in particular, risk preferences are not properly elicited and behavioral issues are not evaluated at all. Our proposal is to review questionnaires taking into the right consideration the scientific achievements of both experimental economics (in terms of elicitation of risk preferences) and behavioral finance (in terms of identification and correction of nonmonetary distortions): our view is that questionnaires should start from the elicitation of individual risk preferences (through the implementation of scientifically certified procedures), then they should be able to control for financial capacity, behavioral distortions, and financial knowledge (through the introduction of selected questions widely used in recent scientific contributions). So, the main contribution of the paper is methodological: actually, it points out a set of open issues to be tackled in order to build a synthetic indicator for clustering investors according to their risk profiles and suggests plausible solutions.