What Are Investors Afraid of? Finding the Big Bad Wolf

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

See the attached report.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

thank you very much for your support. responses to yours comments in italic in the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

The abstract is not informative, i.e. the authors provide neither the purpose of the research nor the limitations of the research.

The introduction part is poor. It is more essay that scientific text, i.e. the authors do not provide any references. The novelty is not presented, the contribution to science is not highlighted as well. Therefore, the question arises what the study was conducted for?

In the second part, the authors refer to outdated literature (only one source is from 2017, the majority of others are older than 20 years).

In the empirical investigation part, the authors claim "Consistently with the relevant literature". It is not clear what the relevant literature is, as no in-text reference are included.

The authors write "...almost 15,000 members, representing around 19% of the population...". The size of the population is not mentioned and the 19% does not prove that the sample size could reflect the whole population. The sample size ought to be calculated and the confidence level and confidence interval must be provided.

The correlation coefficients are presented in Table 2. However, it is not clear if the null hypothesis is rejected or accepted, i.e. reliability tests results are not presented.

It is not clear if the data is distributed normally, hence, it is not clear which tests parametric or non-parametric ought to be used.

I do not understand what the clusters were formed for. Is there any necessity to form the clusters within one pension fund?

Conclusions are vague and do not present the results and their importance for science.

The methodology part is missed.

To sum up, the article does not meet requirements for a high-quality journal as the research is insufficient and results are doubtable.

The paper cannot be published in the scientific journal.

Author Response

thank you very much for your support. Answers to your comments in italic in the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

- The results of the PCA analysis are presented in the table;

- Specify the software used;

- Comparate with similar research and indicate what is the innovation of your research;

- Significantly improve the conclusion (indicate the contribution of research, research limitations...);

- Improve literature with newer sources.

Author Response

thank you very much for your support. The answers to your comments in italic in the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round  2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have significantly improved Introduction and Conclusions. This makes the draft clearer about its purpose, background and contributions. However, I still have the following concerns and comments:

(major) The newly added Table 2 is what I was looking for, but the authors seems unsuccessful in guiding readers to the point: which component of FRA would correspond to/explain risk taking behavior and which component does not. The rest from Table 2 onwards is to use principal component analysis to distill 5 "factors" from 21 items in survey, and then combine with the sixth variable (age) to perform cluster analysis. Once clusters are formed, the authors compare the risk taking behaviour across clusters. My understanding is, by construction, the first 6 variables in Table 5 would show significance. The idea is to see if there is a relationship between one of these 6 variables (i guess, loss aversion) and the last two variables (risk taking in asset allocation, dynamism). The tests are missing. 

Professional editing service is needed. There are many typos and grammar mistakes.

Author Response

We thank the referee for the useful suggestions. To answer his/her major concern we would like to point out that once the clusters are built on the base of the first
six variables in table 5 (the five from the questionnaire and the variable age),
we checked the composition of the clusters with respect to the variables
risk taking, dynamism and gender. In table 5 we showed that the values identifying
the clusters are significantly different from the ones of the entire population
(except for two values) with the use of a statistical test described in the text.
Once showed that the clusters significantly differ from the original population
in terms of risk taking, dynamism and gender, we indirectly proved that the there
is a relationship between the first six variables and the last three.
We tried to be more explicit in the text about this foundamental point.

The text have been checked for spelling and grammar mistakes.