Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Benefit Disclosure in Financial Choices Online and Field Experiments

经济学博士论文研究：在线金融选择和现场实验中的利益披露

• 批准号: 1919483
• 负责人: Mark Dean
• 金额: $ 3.8万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-08-01 至 2020-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1919483&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Benefit

Innovations in consumer finance offering consumers choices in financial products have not increased consumers' ability to take advantage of these choices. Surveys show low financial literacy rates among US adults, resulting in financial mistakes that hurt consumers' financial well-being. Financial education to improve financial literacy have failed because of the false assumption that consumers are aware of the benefits of learning to make financial choices. This research project will use experimental methods to study how information on the benefits of financial education affects consumers' financial decision making. Specifically, it addresses three questions: (i) Are consumers aware of the benefits of learning? (ii) how does awareness (or lack thereof) affect financial decisions?, and (iii) How can policy-makers complement consumers' awareness using benefit disclosure with financial education to improve financial well-being? The results of this research will provide inputs into financial decision making, which will lead to efficient financial decision making, increased savings and investment, hence economic growth.This research proposal will investigate how benefit disclosure affect consumers' financial decision making. The project first proposes a simple theoretical framework incorporating the cost of incentive perception to complement the standard costly-thinking approach. The project then tests the predictions from this framework in two experiments. The first experiment tests the precise mechanisms using incentivized choices in hypothetical controlled scenarios. This experiment manipulates three aspects of the decision environment independently: incentive levels, information about incentives, and education. While the first two variations are aimed directly at understanding the cost of incentive perception, the education treatment both links this project to existing research and more importantly, allows a test of the potential complementarity of the two information interventions. The second experiment focuses on information about incentives and education in a randomized control trial conducted. These two variations allow an investigation into the applicability of benefit disclosure and education, which are policies derived from the framework, in affecting naturalistic choices. This results of this research will improve financial decision making, increase savings and investment and economic growth.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

消费金融创新为消费者提供了金融产品选择，但这并没有提高消费者利用这些选择的能力。调查显示，美国成年人的金融知识普及率很低，导致了损害消费者财务健康的财务错误。 提高金融知识的金融教育已经失败，因为错误的假设，消费者意识到学习做出金融选择的好处。 本研究将采用实验方法，研究有关金融教育益处的信息如何影响消费者的金融决策。 具体而言，它解决了三个问题：（一）消费者是否意识到学习的好处？(ii)意识（或缺乏意识）如何影响财务决策？以及（iii）政策制定者如何利用福利披露和金融教育来补充消费者的意识，以改善财务状况？ 本研究的结果将为消费者的财务决策提供参考，从而提高财务决策的效率，增加储蓄和投资，进而促进经济增长。 该项目首先提出了一个简单的理论框架，将激励感知的成本，以补充标准的成本思维方法。然后，该项目在两个实验中测试了这个框架的预测。第一个实验在假设的控制场景中使用激励选择来测试精确的机制。这个实验独立地操纵了决策环境的三个方面：激励水平、激励信息和教育。虽然前两个变化的目的是直接了解成本的激励观念，教育的治疗既链接到现有的研究，更重要的是，允许测试的潜在互补性的两个信息干预。第二个实验的重点是信息的激励和教育的随机对照试验进行。这两个变化允许调查的适用性的利益披露和教育，这是政策的框架，在影响自然的选择。 这项研究的结果将改善财务决策，增加储蓄和投资以及经济增长。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。