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

消费金融的创新为消费者提供了金融产品的选择，但并没有增加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知晓率较低，导致金融错误，损害了消费者的财务健康。提高金融素养的金融教育失败了，因为错误的假设是，消费者意识到学习做出金融选择的好处。这项研究项目将使用实验方法来研究有关金融教育好处的信息如何影响消费者的金融决策。具体来说，它解决了三个问题：(I)消费者意识到学习的好处了吗？(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利益披露和财务教育来补充消费者的意识，以改善财务健康？本研究将探讨利益披露对消费者财务决策的影响。该项目首先提出了一个简单的理论框架，纳入了激励感知的成本，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来自该框架的预测。第一个实验在假设的受控场景中使用激励性选择来测试精确的机制。本实验独立操纵决策环境的三个方面：激励水平、激励信息和教育。虽然前两种变化的目的是直接了解激励感知的成本，但教育处理既将该项目与现有研究联系起来，更重要的是，允许测试两种信息干预措施的潜在互补性。第二个实验关注的是随机对照试验中有关激励和教育的信息。这两种变化允许对福利披露和教育的适用性进行调查，这些政策源于该框架，在影响自然主义选择方面。这项研究的结果将改善财务决策，增加储蓄和投资，促进经济增长。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.