Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice

Annamaria Lusardi (), Sandro Ambuehl and B. Douglas Bernheim

No 15863, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We introduce a method for experimentally evaluating interventions designed to improve the quality of choices in settings where people imperfectly comprehend consequences. Among other virtues, our method yields an intuitive sufficient statistic for welfare that admits formal interpretations even when consumers suffer from biases outside the scope of analysis. We use it to study a financial education intervention, which we find improves the quality of decisions only when it incorporates practice and feedback, contrary to the implications of analyses based on conventional efficacy metrics. We trace the failures of conventional metrics to violations of assumptions that our method avoids.

JEL-codes: C91 D04 D14 D60 D91 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fle
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice (2022)
Working Paper: Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice (2014)
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