Behavioural Industrial Organisation (BIO) incorporates psychological insights into traditional models of market interactions between firms and consumers. These models often have high predictive power relative to models based on the classical paradigm of the "rational" consumer in markets where...

We present a novel experimental method for investigating consumer choice. The Surplus Identification (S-ID) task is inspired by studies of detection in perceptual psychophysics. It employs a forced-choice procedure, in which participants must decide whether a novel product is worth more or less...

Two laboratory studies investigated the effect of price transparency on consumers' decision-making in the residential electricity market. The first tested whether consumers have difficulties when confronted with unit prices expressed as discounts from standard rates, which vary between...

We hypothesise and confirm a substantial framing effect in relation to whether people opt for an annuity on retirement. Two laboratory experiments were conducted in collaboration with a national pensions regulator. Individuals demanded a higher annuity rate when pensions were initially conceived...

People underestimate long-term growth in savings because they linearise exponential growth - a phenomenon known as exponential growth bias (EGB). This bias has implications for multiple financial decisions, particularly those relating to pensions. We hypothesised that underestimation might be...

This review identifies specific problems for consumers in credit, investment and insurance markets. It identifies multiple product features that are either poorly understood by many consumers or that generate systematic biases in their decisions.

A Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) plan is an innovative, complex and increasingly popular form of car finance. Consumers pay a deposit and monthly payments, but instead of paying off the total value of the car, they pay off the depreciation over a specified term. We used an experiment to...

This paper investigates whether exposure to explanatory diagrams can affect a major financial decision. In a controlled experiment, participants were given pension benefit statements with or without one or two diagrams, before answering incentivised questions that measured recall, comprehension...