Retail investors evaluating impact‐oriented opportunities must weigh economic, social, and environmental performance simultaneously, yet it remains unclear why they prioritize these dimensions so differently. We propose that personal values act as a weighting mechanism in multiattribute investment decisions. In a discrete choice experiment with 547 US retail investors, financial performance and risk dominate on average, but altruistic, biospheric, and egoistic values are each associated with greater weight on the corresponding performance dimension; attribute salience also varies across investment domains. Personal values thus help explain preference heterogeneity that demographic characteristics and cognitive biases alone leave unaccounted for.
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Nielsen et al. (2026) studied this question.
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