The daunting complexity of important financial decisions can lead to procrastination. We evaluate a low-cost intervention that substantially simplifies the retirement savings plan participation decision. Individuals received an opportunity to enroll in a retirement savings plan at a pre-selected...

Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale experiment to test for consistency with utility maximization. Consistency scores vary markedly within and...

The daunting complexity of important financial decisions can lead to procrastination. We evaluate a low-cost intervention that substantially simplifies the retirement savings plan participation decision. Individuals received an opportunity to enroll in a retirement savings plan at a pre-selected...

On November 14th, 2014, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum – and CNMV, Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores – the Spanish Authority for supervision of securities markets – jointly organized a conference in Madrid: Challenges in Securities Markets Regulation: Investor...

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists...

We show that a one-off incentive to bias advice has a persistent effect on advisers' own actions and their future recommendations. In an experiment, advisers obtained information about a set of three differently risky investment options to advise less informed clients. The riskiest option was...

This paper uses a framed field experiment to test the effect of persuasive communication as a strategy in the fight against drugs in Colombia. Our design varies the salience and the degree of informativeness of the messages that participants receive, while highlighting particular negative...

We show that a one-off incentive to bias advice has persistent effects. In an experiment, some advisers were paid a bonus to recommend a lottery which only risk-seeking individuals should choose to a less informed client. Afterwards, they had to choose for themselves and make a second...

This paper uses a framed field experiment to test the effect of persuasive communication as a strategy in the fight against drugs in Colombia. Our design varies the salience and the degree of informativeness of the messages that participants receive, while highlighting particular negative...

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists...