What do people expect from a financial awareness platform? Insights from an online survey

The aim of this study is to present the analysis of an online survey that was conducted in order to investigate individual attitudes and requirements from an online financial awareness platform. The survey aimed to elicit users’ self-assessed financial knowledge, financial capability and awareness, along with facets of their financial behaviour. Moreover, it entailed questions capturing attitudes towards technology and internet usage. Specifically, it targeted requirements for specific resources and features of a financial awareness platform, along with explicit motivations and incentives for participating and contributing to the platform of the PROFIT project. The custom-made online survey was completed by 494 respondents from different demographic groups and user groups, i.e., in terms of familiarity and requirements. The results indicate that there is a strong existing need in the market for online financial information and awareness development with online tools

Cognitive sophistication and deliberation times

Differences in cognitive sophistication and effort are at the root of behavioral heterogeneity in economics. To explain this heterogeneity, behavioral models assume that certain choices indicate higher cognitive effort. A fundamental problem with this approach is that observing a choice does not reveal how the choice is made, and hence choice data is insufficient to establish the link between cognitive effort and behavior. We show that deliberation times provide an individually-measurable correlate of cognitive effort. We test a model of heterogeneous cognitive depth, incorporating stylized facts from the psychophysical literature, which makes predictions on the relation between choices, cognitive effort, incentives, and deliberation times. We confirm the predicted relations experimentally in different kinds of games