Consumer Vulnerability and Behavioral Biases

Hanming Fang and Zenan Wu ()
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Zenan Wu: Peking University

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: A wealth of evidence shows that individuals are biased and ?rms can often exploit consumers’ behavioral biases in their contract designs. In this paper, we study how vulnerable biased individuals are to their own behavioral biases in market equilibrium, and focus on the role of risk aversion and intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES). We measure consumer vulnerability by the percentage loss in a consumer’s equilibrium certainty equivalent from a market with non-biased consumers to that with biased ones. We examine several important behavioral biases that have been extensively studied in the literature, including the impact of biased beliefs (either over- or under-con?dence) in an insurance market, the impact of present bias and na¨ivete about present bias in a dynamic model of credit contract design, the impact of projection bias about habit formation, and the impact of expectation-based loss aversion on an investor’s portfolio choice. We show that consumer vulnerability to all four commonly studied behavioral biases has a non-monotonic relationship with risk aversion or IES. This is in striking contrast to the deviations in the equilibrium allocations from the rational benchmark, which are often monotonic to the risk aversion or IES. We also consider a setting of biased agents with Epstein-Zin preferences to isolate the e?ect of risk aversion from that of IES.

Keywords: Behavioral Biases; Welfare; Vulnerability; Biased Belief; Present Bias; Projection Bias; Prospect Theory; Loss Aversion; Epstein-Zin Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 D81 D86 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2020-11-13
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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