An investigation of the consistency of financial advice offered by web-based sources

Individuals increasingly rely on web-based sources for financial advice. But does the advice you get depend on the site you visit? Relying on standardized input data from three different family scenarios, we observe that the variation in advice across web-sites increases with client input complexity. Web advice dispersion also differs in magnitude across financial planning domains such as insurance, investments, retirement, income tax, and estate tax. ‘Live advisor’ financial solutions, however, are not always more consistent than those available on the web. Human advice varies less with client complexity, but in certain planning domains web advice has lower dispersion. The results suggest that client characteristics and planning domains matter in the development of efficient distribution mechanisms for financial advice.