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普及程度较低，导致财务错误，损害了消费者的财务健康。提高金融素养的金融教育之所以失败，是因为人们错误地认为，消费者意识到学习做出金融选择的好处。本研究项目将采用实验方法来研究关于金融教育的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？（iii）政策制定者如何利用利益披露和金融教育来补充消费者的意识，以改善财务状况？本研究的结果将为金融决策提供投入，这将导致有效的金融决策，增加储蓄和投资，从而实现经济增长。本研究计划将探讨利益披露如何影响消费者的财务决策。该项目首先提出了一个简单的理论框架，将激励感知的成本纳入其中，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该框架的预测。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，允许对两种信息干预的潜在互补性进行测试。第二个实验集中在一项随机对照试验中关于激励和教育的信息。这两种变化允许调查利益披露和教育在影响自然选择方面的适用性，这是源于框架的政策。这一研究结果将改善金融决策，增加储蓄和投资，促进经济增长。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，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.