Fed/GFLEC Financial Literacy Seminar Series

April 8, 2015

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Seminar III: Enhanced active choice: A new method to motivate behavior change

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Punam Keller, Distinguished Financial Literacy Speaker

Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management, Dartmouth College


What's the Big Idea in Financial Literacy? Enhanced Active Choice

LOCATION

George Washington University Science and Engineering Hall
800 22nd Street NW, Room B1270

Bio: Punam Keller

Dr. Punam A. Keller is the Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Dr. Keller’s academic resume includes degrees from Bombay University and Northwestern, award-winning research, and faculty positions at NYU, Columbia, and UNC. Dr. Keller served as associate editor of Journal of Consumer Research and currently is on the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and Social Marketing Quarterly. Dr. Keller was formerly the President of the Association for Consumer Research.

Through the years, Dr. Keller has served as a consumer research consultant and educator to a variety of financial educators including FINRA foundation, CFPB, CFA, OECD, Filene Institute, NASAA, DCIIA, and AARP. She has developed social marketing plans to promote financial education for the OFEFA, U.S. Department of Treasury, and NEFE. She served as the Social Marketing Officer of the Financial Literacy Center under Director Annamaria Lusardi, funded by the SSA. She teaches Social Marketing and Cause Marketing in the MBA program at Tuck.

 


 

Abstract

High rates of medication non-adherence have significant public health and economic consequences. In other contexts such as savings behavior, opt-out policies, in which the alternative preferred by the policy maker is made the default, have gotten great traction but may not be feasible in health care settings. After reviewing previous applications, we present a series of studies, including two field experiments, that test the effectiveness of an alternative, ‘active choice’ policy in which there is no default, but decision makers are required to make a choice (Carroll, Choi, Laibson, Madrian, & Metrick, 2009; Spital, 1993, 1995). In addition, we propose and test a modified version of active choice, that we call ‘enhanced active choice’ that favors one alternative by highlighting losses incumbent in the non-preferred alternative. We recommend Enhanced Active Choice as a complement to automatic enrollment or when automatic enrollment is infeasible or unethical.