This paper shows evidence for expense neglect in how consumers forecast their future spare money or “financial slack.” Even though people generally think that both their income and expenses will rise in the future, we find that they systematically under-weigh the extent to which their...

It is common for authors discovering a significant interaction of a measured variable X with a manipulated variable Z to examine simple effects of Z at different levels of X. These “spotlight” tests are often misunderstood even in the simplest cases, and it appears that consumer researchers...

Iacobucci, Posovac, Kardes, Schneider, and Popavich (2015a) published a defense of median splits. We (McClelland, Lynch, Irwin, Spiller, and Fitzsimons 2015) and Rucker, McShane, and Preacher (2015) published criticism of each of the key conclusions from Iacobucci et al. Iacobucci et al. (2015b)...

Many consumers suffer from low levels of financial literacy, and attempts to increase this dimension of consumer expertise via educational interventions are typically unsuccessful. We argue that many of these apparent deficits are caused by the distribution of responsibility for information and...

Though perceived financial well-being is viewed as an important topic of consumer research, the literature contains no accepted definition of this construct. Further, there has been little systematic examination of how perceived financial well-being may affect overall well-being. Using consumer...

Behavioral researchers use analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests of differences between treatment means or chi-square tests of differences between proportions to provide support for empirical hypotheses about consumer behavior. These tests are typically conducted on data from “between-subjects”...

Policy makers have embraced financial education as a necessary antidote to the increasing complexity of consumers' financial decisions over the last generation. We conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship of financial literacy and of financial education to financial behaviors in 168 papers...