Information Asymmetry and the Financial Consumer Protection Policy

As complex structure of financial products severely limits consumers' understanding and causes an information asymmetry, the need to protect financial consumers has been a target of heated debates. This study designs a game theory-based model and presents that the reason behind an inadequate advisory service by financial institutions is a combination of consumers' poor financial literacy and sellers' abuse of such weakness to pursue their own profits. Our model shows that when there is information asymmetry on both product characteristics and investment preference of financial consumers, having competing companies that offer substitute products is not enough to ensure a proper advisory service. Two measures may be considered to address this issue. The first measure would be voluntary market efforts to strengthen financial consumer's literacy and self-regulatory mechanism. The second measure would be to step up administrative regulations on financial product sellers in both ex-ante and ex-post mechanisms.