14 New Findings: Consumer Finance Research
Having migrated from the world of academia to market research ten years ago, I appreciate the patience and care with which my academic colleagues pursue basic research without knowing for sure how (or whether) it will be used in the real world.
But I can tell them this: It does get used, so keep doing it. It allows people like me to bring new insights and new levels of rigor to the practical and sometimes urgent research questions that our customers need to have answered.
The Journal of Marketing Research has just published a special interdisciplinary issue on Consumer Financial Decision Making. It is hot off the press, so we have yet to read it all. But in the coming weeks we’ll be reading, reviewing, and using the findings in these articles to bring deeper insight to the work that we do for our customers.
In the meantime, here are the article titles, with links to the authors’ summaries, from the special issue of JMR that focuses on research in consumer finance:
- Misunderstanding Savings Growth: Implications for Retirement Savings Behavior
- Earmarking and Partitioning: Increasing Saving by Low-Income Households
- Increasing Saving Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self
- Winning the Battle but Losing the War: The Psychology of Debt Management
- Using Loan Plus Lender Literacy Information to Combat One-Sided Marketing of Debt Consolidation Loans
- Minimum Required Payment and Supplemental Information Disclosure Effects on Consumer Debt Repayment Decisions
- Leave Home Without It? The Effects of Credit Card Debt and Available Credit on Spending
- Axe the Tax: Taxes Are Disliked More than Equivalent Costs
- Once Burned, Twice Shy: How Naive Learning, Counterfactuals, and Regret Affect the Repurchase of Stocks Previously Sold
- Fear, Social Projection, and Financial Decision Making
- Microfinance Decision Making: A Field Study of Prosocial Lending
- Tell Me a Good Story and I May Lend You Money: The Role of Narratives in Peer-to-Peer Lending Decisions
- Marketing Complex Financial Products in Emerging Markets: Evidence from Rainfall Insurance in India
- Are Consumers Too Trusting? The Effects of Relationships with Expert Advisers
Need help interpreting and applying these academic findings to the research questions your financial services team has? Give us a call at 312-348-6089 and we would be happy to help you think about how to bring more insight to your research, and then how to find useful stories in your data that can be put into action.
—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.
