Purchases fall along a continuum from ordinary (common or frequent) to exceptional (unusual or infrequent), with many of the largest expenses (e.g., electronics, celebrations) being the most exceptional. Across seven studies, we show that, while people are fairly adept at budgeting and...

Traditional financial literacy interventions are frequently ineffective at improving financial outcomes. We test an alternative approach using a field experiment with over 400,000 student loan borrowers in which treatment group members received communications about the availability of their FICO...

In this paper, we provide a framework for conceptualizing and identifying differences between anchors and targets (i.e., non-status quo reference points). While these two types of values are often treated interchangeably by academic audiences, they recruit meaningfully different psychological...

Consumers can prefer a price disclosure format that can cost them. Across a variety of products, we find that many consumers prefer partitioned price disclosures (i.e., separating charges into multiple line items without totals) to consolidated disclosures (i.e., those displaying the total price...