Selective Attention in Consumer Finance: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in the Credit Card Market

Selective Attention in Consumer Finance: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in the Credit Card Market

7 July, 2020    

In partnership with a Personal Finance Platform in Brazil, I implement a randomized intervention to measure the effect of reminders for timely payment of credit card bills. While I find a 13% reduction in the cost of late fees paid, 31% of the users that avoid credit card late payments, incur instead overdraft fees on their checking accounts. This leads to heterogeneous gains from the intervention with some users saving 15% in total fees paid, and others incurring increased fees of 5%. I interpret these results using theories of salience-driven selective attention, and argue that informational nudges may inflate the perceived importance of the target task. The results of this experiment suggest that when designing policy interventions, one size may not fit all, and targeting nudges to those who are more likely to benefit from them has the potential to significantly increase the gains from the intervention

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