توسعه و اعتبار سنجی مقیاس ارزش سرمایه گذاری درک شده (PIV)

This study aims to develop a complementary and more comprehensive measurement to assess the nature of investment value affecting consumers’ investment behavior. Recent research suggests that consumers may desire and obtain certain outcomes from investments that have not been anticipated in mainstream finance and economics literature. These benefits might be hedonistic or altruistic, self-expressive or emotional and experiential. Yet, while an increasing amount of attention has been paid to this topic, little effort has been made to develop an appropriate measurement scale for the subjective consumer perceptions of investments. To address this gap in the literature, this study introduces the concept of Perceived Investment Value (PIV), and develops and validates a measurement scale for the concept. The ultimate 18-item PIV scale parsimoniously represents six Perceived Investment Value dimensions: Economic value—Monetary savings; Economic value—Efficiency; Functional value—Convenience; Emotional value—Emotions and Experiences; Symbolic value—Altruism; and Symbolic value—Esteem. The final measurement scale demonstrates acceptable reliability and validity. Implications related to the developed scale are discussed in terms of their potential to inform a future research agenda.

The most important assumption of modern finance and microeconomic theories is that the value of various investments is embedded in their transaction-based benefits and sacrifices, specifically the risk-adjusted return. This paradigm treats people as economic actors (Homo economicus) and assumes that investment value can be derived by means of profit maximization, rationality, and perfect information. Although some of these assumptions have been relaxed in behavioral finance/economics—explaining why and how people make seemingly irrational or illogical decisions when they spend, invest, save, and borrow money (Barberis & Huang, 2001)—the risk/return framework remains intact in investment research. Recent research, however, has begun to recognize that it may not be expected financial returns and risks alone that determine an investor’s willingness to invest in stocks (Fama & French, 2007). Indeed, Statman (2004) claims that it is no more reasonable to expect individuals to be concerned only about risk and return when compiling an investment portfolio than it is to expect them to be concerned only about cost and nutrition when deciding what to eat. Recently many studies have adopted consumer behavior theories and techniques in search of a more holistic view of investing, the preferences that affect it, and also financial behaviors in general (Canova et al., 2005 and Sullivan and Miller, 1996). This approach posits that consumers may desire and obtain certain outcomes from investments that have not been anticipated in mainstream finance and economic literature. Those outcomes might include entertainment considerations (Dorn & Sengmueller, 2009); self-expressive benefits (Statman, 2004); self-expressive, emotional, and experiential benefits (Fama & French, 2007); and psychic return (Beal et al., 2005). Illustrations have also been offered by Nilsson (2009), who compared investment styles among mutual-fund investors and identified a group primarily concerned with the social responsibility of the funds, and Sullivan and Miller (1996), who identified three types of venture capital investor; distinguished by their economic, hedonistic, and altruistic motives. Research is increasingly contributing to our understanding of the subjective evaluations consumers undertake when considering investing, and prior studies address a variety of aspects of those evaluations and some relatively loosely-defined concepts, such as considerations, benefits, and motives. In addition to the abundance of concepts applied to describe subjective evaluations of investments, an important limitation of these studies is that the scales used to measure the concepts do not appear to have acquired commonly accepted standards of scale development (Churchill, 1979 and Rossiter, 2002). This is a consequence of the fact that appropriate scale development would require constructs that are conceptually well defined. In their absence, the conceptual definition of the construct will not be adequate to indicate how the construct should be measured. Accordingly, there is an obvious need to (a) capture these subjective factors within a well-defined concept and (b) develop an appropriate measurement scale for the subjective perceptions in relation to investments. For this purpose, this study adopts a consumer behavior-theoretical concept of perceived value, and develops and validates a measurement scale for the perceptions of expected financial return and other subjective elements to which investment research has increasingly referred. While this study attempts to extend the perspective on consumers’ value perceptions, we do not challenge standard finance theory per se. Instead, the paper aims to develop a complementary, and more comprehensive measurement to assess the nature of investment value as it affects consumer behavior. The concept of perceived value has attracted special attention not only because of its importance in current theoretical discourse in both academia and practice, but also because the concept of perceived value seems to be a richer, broader, and more comprehensive measure of consumers’ subjective overall evaluation than any mere tradeoff between risk and profit.

The approach in this paper to the concept of value in investment was quite the opposite to the notion of mainstream financial theories, which suggest that it is possible to assess the value of investments objectively. While recent research has begun to recognize the importance of the subjectively defined concept of value (perceived value) in the financial services context (e.g., Maas, 2010), the present research remains, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first attempt to adopt a comprehensive approach to defining and measuring consumers’ value perceptions in the investment context. To summarize, the foregoing conceptualization and measurement of PIV indicates that it is best modeled and measured as a multidimensional construct that includes six types of value (see Table 5). The reliability measures, factor structures, and validity tests indicate that the 18-item PIV scale and its six dimensions have sound and stable psychometric properties.In terms of reliability and validity, the findings of this research are also subject to several caveats. First, the measures established here originate in the literature and other measurement systems may yield different results. There is also a limitation inherent in the samples, which were drawn from members of the Federation of Stock Investors. Naturally, the choice of sample affects the result. We concluded that PIV is a multidimensional concept that includes, for example, symbolic or emotional considerations. While the empirical results support this view, it is important to note that these aspects of investment are probably more important to a member of the Federation of Stock Investors than to average investors. The point of this project was to map all possible value dimensions, so it had to leave to future research the question of the extent to which average household consumers would perceive the value dimensions presented here.