Best Buys and Own Brands: Investment Platforms’ Recommendations of Mutual Funds
研究英国投资平台的基金推荐如何受佣金和自有品牌影响，发现平台偏爱自有品牌和高佣金基金，而监管禁止佣金分成降低了成本并提高了推荐的信息含量。
Abstract Individuals increasingly buy mutual funds via online platforms, whose “best-buy” recommendations heavily influence flows. As intermediaries of mutual funds, platforms provide none of the unobservable interaction or intangible benefits of brokers, and so allow clean tests of the determinants, influence, and value of their fund recommendations. Using unique U.K. data, we find that platforms favor “own-brand” funds and those paying them a higher commission share. Investors discount own-brand recommendations, but not those paying high commission shares (which were not observable in the United Kingdom). A regulatory ban on commission sharing lowered costs and improved the informativeness of platform recommendations.