Call for papers: Consumer Behavior in Financial Markets

Feb. 28, 2020

The Swedish House of Finance is pleased to invite interested academics and practitioners to a conference on “Consumer Behavior in Financial Markets” on August 24-25, 2020, in Stockholm.

Conference theme

As retail financial markets grow increasingly opaque and the responsibility for financial planning shifts more towards individuals, greater and greater amounts of financial sophistication are required just to make ordinary household financial decisions. At the same time, a large body of work in behavioral economics and psychology demonstrates that people hold biased self-perceptions. These biases are likely to be especially important in the domain of household finance, where simple heuristics are used in complex decision environments, and where meaningful feedback about the efficacy of these heuristics is noisy and infrequent. In such environments, individuals can persistently hold (and act on) mistaken beliefs about their own financial acumen.

This conference brings together some of the leaders of the field of household and behavioral finance and decision-making for a two-day conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The first conference day will feature keynote presentations and panels with leading scholars and practitioners. The program includes keynote addresses by Annamaria Lusardi (George Washington University), Olivia Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania), Terrance Odean (University of California at Berkeley) and Luis Viceira (Harvard University).

 

Call for papers

For the second day of the conference, which has a standard academic format, we invite authors to submit high-quality research at the intersection of household and behavioral finance, individual decision-making and choice architecture including (but not limited to) such topics as:

• Do educational programs help consumers to make better financial decisions?
• Does the retail banking sector evolve promoting household welfare? Does it nurture or correct household biases?
• Which regulations are needed to improve household financial choices?
• Is there scope for new financial products that better solve savings and borrowing decisions?
• Which groups of consumers are particularly vulnerable for making poor choices?
• What is and could be the role of big data in shaping the retail banking sector? How does this relate to the fintech revolution?
• How can sustainability be integrated into financial decisions, and what does it mean for consumers?

Both empirical and theoretical papers are welcome. SHoF will provide accommodation as well as reimbursement for reasonable travel expenses for presenters and discussants.