This experimental study measures three types of overconfidence in the decision behavior of participants from Germany and Japan. In the first stage of the experiment subjects completed a Raven Progressive Matrices test and subsequently assessed their test performance in absolute and relative...

Advice is important for decision making, especially in the financial sector. We investigate how individuals assess risk preferences of others given sociodemographic information or pictures. Both non-professionals and fi nancial professionals participate in this artefactual field experiment....

The current study examines individual decision making in the fi eld of personal finance. How do people arrive at a financial decision? A laboratory experiment investigates the way external information is integrated into the decision making process. The objective is to explore the link between...

The current study examines individual decision making in the field of personal finance. How do people arrive at a financial decision? A laboratory experiment investigates the way external information is integrated into the decision-making process. Financial literacy shows to lower demand for...

The current study examines individual decision making in the field of personal finance. A laboratory experiment investigates the way naïve advice influences the decisionmaking process. When advice is offered on demand, participants prefer expert over naïve advice. Although naïve advice is...

There is consensus that the recent financial crisis revolved around a crash of the short-term credit market. Yet there is no agreement around the necessary policies to prevent another credit freeze. In this experiment we test the effects that contract length (i.e. maturity mismatch) has on the...

We examine experimentally the effect of complexity on individual decision making. We focus on credit choices, as they have been widely criticized for their complexity in recent years. In a first study, we find that complexity in benefits leads to random mistakes, while complexity in costs leads...

This paper examines the effect of peers on individual risk taking. In the absence of informational motives, we investigate why social utility concerns may drive peer effects. We test for two main channels: utility from payoff differences and from conforming to the peer. We show experimentally...

This paper examines the distributional impact of increases to out-of-work transfers, increases to work-contingent transfers, and increases in higher rates of income tax over the whole of life. We find that, in contrast to what is implied by standard snapshot analyses, increases to...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have an asymmetric distribution of outcomes. In a series of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate the asymmetry or ignore it completely. Participants...