Personal advice vs. professional advice: how financial literacy moderates joint decision-making in cryptocurrency investment

Abstract

Purpose Drawing on social influence theory and self-efficacy theory, this study aims to investigate how personal and professional financial advice are associated with cryptocurrency investment behavior and how financial and investment literacy moderate these relationships, addressing the underexplored interplay between financial advice and literacy in high-risk digital asset markets. Design/methodology/approach Using pooled cross-sectional data from 4,425 respondents in the 2021 and 2024 US National Financial Capability Study Investor Survey, this study employs probit models to test the core relationships between advice channel and cryptocurrency investment. In addition, this study conducts moderation analyses to assess the moderating roles of objective and subjective dimensions of financial and investment literacy, respectively. Findings This study reveals that personal advice from family and friends is positively associated with cryptocurrency investment likelihood, whereas professional advice is negatively associated with it, and these opposing associations are robust across intra-household decision structures. Additionally, objective financial and investment literacy significantly attenuates the positive association between personal advice and cryptocurrency investment, while subjective investment literacy significantly mitigates the negative association between professional advice and cryptocurrency investment. These asymmetric moderation effects suggest that financial and investment knowledge helps investors resist normative social influences, while domain-specific overconfidence undermines the effectiveness of professional guidance. Originality/value This study pioneers the integration of advice source heterogeneity with dimension-specific literacy moderation in cryptocurrency contexts. By revealing the asymmetric moderating effects across objective and subjective dimensions of financial and investment literacy, it challenges the complementarity hypothesis while partially supporting the substitution hypothesis.