Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice / Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, Annamaria Lusardi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ambuehl, Sandro.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bernheim, B. Douglas.

Lusardi, Annamaria.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20618.

NBER working paper series no. w20618

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

We examine methods for evaluating opportunity-neutral interventions designed to improve the quality of decision making in settings where people imperfectly comprehend consequences. In an experiment involving financial education, conventional outcome metrics (financial literacy and directional changes in behavior) imply that two interventions, one with practice and feedback, one without, are equally beneficial even though only the first reduces average bias. We trace these evaluative failures to violations of implicit assumptions. We propose a simple intuitive outcome metric that properly differentiates between the interventions, and that is robustly interpretable as a measure of welfare loss even when consumers suffer from other biases.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2014.