The Fewer the Better: Number of Goals and Savings Behaviour
The Fewer the Better: Number of Goals and Savings Behaviour
7 July, 2020 •Similar Articles
Saving by Default: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural India
Worldwide, people are gaining access to a formal bank account, which allows account-based instead of cash payments. Based on a novel randomized con...
Price and Information Type in Life Microinsurance Demand: Experimental Evidence from Mexico
Poor households in developing countries face large and varied risks, but often have inadequate informal tools to manage them. Microinsurance is bei...
Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India
Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in ...
This article examines the effect of the number of goals on consumers’ savings behavior. Drawing from research on implementation intention, the authors show that under certain conditions, presenting a single savings goal leads to greater savings intention and actual savings than presenting multiple savings goals. Multiple goals typically evoke trade-offs among competing goals and thus increase the likelihood that people will remain in a deliberative mind-set and defer actions. In contrast, the authors pro pose and demonstrate that a single goal evokes a stronger implementation intention, which in turn has a greater effect on behavior change. They also show that the advantage of a single goal over multiple goals on saving is attenuated when saving is easier to implement or when the multiple savings goals are integrated rather than competing among themselves. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.