Sandro Ambuehl

Abstract: How do individuals value noisy information that guides economic decisions? In our laboratory experiment, we find that individuals underreact to increasing the informativeness of a signal, thus undervalue high-quality information, and that they disproportionately prefer information that may yield certainty. Both biases appear to be mainly due to non-standard belief updating. We find that individuals differ consistently in their responsiveness to information – the extent that their beliefs move upon observing signals. Individual parameters of responsiveness to information have explanatory power in two distinct choice environments and are unrelated to proxies for mathematical aptitude.

Abstract: IRBs can disallow high incentives they deem coercive. A vignette study on MTurk concerning participation in medical trials shows that a substantial minority of subjects concurs. They think...

Abstract: We introduce a method for measuring the quality of financial decision making built around a notion of financial competence, which gauges the alignment between individuals' choices and those they would make if they properly understood their opportunities. We use it to document the potential pitfalls of the types of brief rhetoric-laden interventions commonly used for adult financial education. Motivational rhetoric can render the effects of such interventions indiscriminate even when people appear to understand and internalize the targeted concepts. Conventional methods of evaluation involving financial literacy, self-reported decision strategies, and directional effects on choices do not reliably detect these deficiencies.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Abstract: We introduce the concept of financial competence, a measure of the extent to which individuals’ financial choices align with those they would make if they properly understood their opportunity sets. Unlike existing measures of the quality of financial decision making, the concept is firmly rooted in the principles of choice-based behavioral welfare analysis; it also avoids the types of paternalistic judgments that are common in policy discussions. We document the importance of assessing financial competence by demonstrating, through an example, that an educational intervention can appear highly successful according to conventional outcome measures while failing to improve the quality of financial decision making. Specifically, we study a simple intervention concerning compound interest that significantly improves performance on a test of conceptual knowledge (which subjects report operationalizing in their decisions), and appears to counteract exponential growth bias. However, financial competence (welfare) does not improve. We trace the mechanisms that account for these seemingly divergent findings.

Abstract: Our recent working paper (Ambuehl, Ockenfels, and Stewart 2017) shows theoretically and experimentally that people with higher costs of information processing respond more to an increase in the incentive for a complex transaction, and decide to participate based on a worse understanding of its consequences. Here, we address the resulting tradeoff between the principle of informed consent and the principle of free contract. Respondents to our vignette study on oocyte donation overwhelmingly favor the former and support policies that require donors to thoroughly understand the transaction. This finding helps design markets that are not only efficient but also considered ethical.

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Abstract: "Nudge"-style interventions are often deemed successful if they generate large behavior change at low cost, but they are rarely subjected to full social welfare evaluations. We combine a field experiment with a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the welfare effects of one especially policy-relevant intervention, home energy social comparison reports. In our sample, the reports increase social welfare, although traditional evaluation approaches overstate gains because they ignore significant costs incurred by nudge recipients. Overall, home energy report welfare gains might be overstated by $620 million. We develop a prediction algorithm for optimal targeting; this approach would double the welfare gains.

Abstract: 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 financial narratives, several large-scale surveys, and two experiments, we conceptualize perceived financial well-being as two related but separate constructs: 1) stress related to the management of money today (current money management stress), and 2) a sense of security in one’s financial future (expected future financial security). We develop and validate measures of these constructs (web appendix A) and then demonstrate their relationship to overall well-being, controlling for other life domains and objective measures of the financial domain. Our findings demonstrate that perceived financial well-being is a key predictor of overall well-being and comparable in magnitude to the combined effect of other life domains (job satisfaction, physical health assessment, and relationship support satisfaction). Further, the relative importance of current money management stress to overall well-being varies by income groups and due to the differing antecedents of current money management stress and expected future financial security. Implications for financial well-being and education efforts are offered.

Abstract: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a Mathematical Programming technique that finds a number of applications to measure the performance of similar units. The performance of these units say Decision Making Units (DMU) is assessed with DEA is obtained by using the concept of Efficiency which is the ratio of Weighted Sum of outputs to weighted sum of inputs. The efficiency obtained by using DEA are relative to best performance of Virtual DMU. In the present study, the efficiency of Production has been measured by specifying and estimating the parameters of Translog output distance function. Further, a non-parametric approach has been applied to measure the efficiency of production by constructing several Linear Programming Problem based on Translog output distance function to study efficiency variation in Indian Commercial Banks.