Abstract

In the era of digitalization, retail investors who buy/trade financial products through digital platforms often find themselves facing dark patterns, i.e. design models of online interfaces that exploit biases and emotions, leading them to make economic choices that are not always in their best interest. This contribution aims to explore the issue of dark patterns in the retail investment sector and the related regulatory outlooks. Therefore, it examines the perspectives that arise from the use of behavioral sciences and artificial intelligence to enhance the predominantly emerging command-and-control regulation in order to curb the phenomenon of dark patterns