Author(s): Diptayan Bhattacheryya, Gouranga Patra and Samyadip Chakraborty
Financial markets have been evolving rapidly with technological development and enhanced information accessibility by investors. It has become more complicated since investors’ choice-options and chance for making either rational or illogical decisions based on profound or limited knowledge respectively, have also grown manifold with availability of online investment options. Extant studies have largely discussed the conventional aspects of investment in different studies related to behavioural finance. Traditional investment orientation believes that investors are rational and make smart investment decisions to maximize profit or gain by selecting the best investment option, especially in difficult times. However, evidence highlights that investment decision making of individual investors depends not only on the availability of funds, but also on the understanding of different investment patterns. Therefore, it is very important for the marketers to understand the different levels of orientation of investors which help them to make the right investment decision about their personal financial investment. This study attempts to investigate the financial investment backdrop among the small ticket individual investors and also to identify the prominent factors affecting investment decision making for investment in financial products. Using a three-pronged triangulation approach of extant literature survey, case-based factual description and empirical validation, this study, using a structured questionnaire explored the aspects that concerned the small ticket investors in the investment front. Using exploratory factor analysis over a total sample response dataset of 284 small ticket investors from Eastern India (where mostly small ticket size investors are service class individuals), the study establishes six core investment behavioral dimensions for small ticket investors in Indian context, namely behavioural, psychological, investment, risk, technological and socio-economic orientations. The study moves forward and takes the first step towards proposing the scale items for small ticket-size investment-choice driver scale; thereby contributing to both academic and practitioners' body of knowledge.