Financial Literacy, Finfluencer Exposure and FOMO-Driven Investment Decisions in the ASEAN-5

This structured review examines the interaction between the exposure to social media financial influencers (finfluencers) and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in making investment decisions among retail investors in the 5 economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. A structured search of Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science yielded 19 studies applicable to the study and grouped into three thematic streams: FOMO as an investment behavioural bias, the mechanisms by which finfluencers influence investments, and financial literacy as a moderating variable.

The findings of this study provide clear support for a consistent relationship between exposure to finfluencers and FOMO related to investing, as well as a relationship between FOMO and impulsive trading behavior, though not direct causality of this relationship can be inferred from almost exclusively cross-sectional self-report designs in the literature. Moderation evidence is not only partial, but contradictory. One Indonesian study reports that financial literacy moderates the framing effect but does not affect the finfluencer effect, a second reports that financial literacy is the strongest direct predictor of rational evaluation but does have an indirect effect on the finfluencer pathway, a third reports that financial literacy has an indirect effect on the finfluencer pathway but does not affect the framing effect, and an experimental study outside this region reports that financial literacy does moderate the effect of finfluencer credibility on intention to invest but does not affect the influencer pathway. A test of FOMO's role in Thailand returned a null result.

This review argues that the pattern is predictable from a construct mismatch: the finfluencer-to-FOMO pathway is emotional and social, while financial literacy as operationalised by the OECD/INFE toolkit and the Big Three measures is cognitive. The contribution here is not an untested set of models, but a theoretically specified set of models, given that there is conflicting evidence in the ASEAN countries, with only single country examples reported. A moderated mediation model is hypothesized, along with seven directional hypotheses that separate moderation of the exposure-FOMO path from moderation of the FOMO-to-decision path, as well as the longitudinal or experimental designs that such a model would entail are described.