By Emerson Sprick

Insight Overview

IDEAS IN THE INSIGHT YOU CAN PUT INTO ACTION

These two articles outline the possibilities that researchers have explored to understand why consumers make suboptimal financial decisions. The articles find significant support for the hypothesis that cognitive ability, or general intelligence, plays an important role, as does the influence of social networks and other information that might seem to be irrelevant to financial decisions. The authors suggest that financial education often fails to promote better decision-making and that regulatory efforts have not succeeded in consistently improving decision-making, which complicates efforts by the government to help Americans achieve better financial outcomes.