Occasional Paper No. 47: Blackbird’s alarm call or nightingale’s lullaby? The effect of tweet risk warnings on attractiveness, search, and understanding

We present the results of a series of experiments to investigate the effects of risk warnings in social media adverts on attractiveness, search and understanding.

Occasional Paper No.47 (PDF)

Occasional Paper No.47 Appendix (PDF)

Summary

The results show that, for character-limited social media, standalone compliance reduces consumers’ information search and understanding of risks, ultimately leading to them choosing less suitable products.  

Authors

Timothy L. Mullett (Warwick Business School and University of Bath), Laura Smart (Financial Conduct Authority) and Neil Stewart (Warwick Business School).

Disclaimer

Occasional Papers contribute to the work of the FCA by providing rigorous research results and stimulating debate. While they may not necessarily represent the position of the FCA, they are one source of evidence that the FCA may use while discharging its functions and to inform its views. The FCA endeavours to ensure that research outputs are correct, through checks including independent referee reports, but the nature of such research and choice of research methods is a matter for the authors using their expert judgement. To the extent that Occasional Papers contain any errors or omissions, they should be attributed to the individual authors, rather than to the FCA.