Bank customers are not financial experts, and yet they make high-stakes decisions that can substantively affect personal wealth. This raises questions about how non-experts actually make financial decisions. How do investors search for information? How does the information they look up map into...

There is compelling evidence that typical decision-makers, including individual investors and even professional money managers, care about the difference between their portfolio returns and a reference point, or benchmark return. In the context of financial markets, likely benchmarks against...