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This study documents the extent to which first-time homebuyers seeking a mortgage accurately estimate their borrowing capacity and how this is associated with their decisions regarding mortgage debt and the take-up of a free offer of financial coaching. We find that consumers who underestimate their nonmortgage debt (31.5% of the sample) also take out larger mortgages relative to income. Consumers who underestimate or overestimate their total debt as well as their monthly debt payments are more likely to accept the offer of financial coaching. Moreover, overconfidence in financial matters reduces the take-up of financial coaching. These biases in perceived financial status appear to be systematically related to behavior among a group of relatively inexperienced consumers. These findings suggest that efforts to extend homeownership may need to include debiasing mechanisms to help less informed consumers accurately assess their current debt levels and ability to make ongoing mortgage payments.

An active area of research within economics concerns the underpinnings of why people give to charitable causes. This study takes a new approach to this question by exploring motivations for giving among children aged 3-5. Using data gathered from 122 children, our artefactual field experiment naturally permits us to disentangle pure altruism and warm glow motivators for giving. We find evidence for the existence of pure altruism but not warm glow. Our results suggest pure altruism is a fundamental component of our preferences, and highlight that warm glow preferences found amongst adults likely develop over time. One speculative hypothesis is that warm glow preferences are learned through socialization.

We experimentally investigate the effect of social identification and information feedback on individual behavior in contests. In all treatments, we find significant overexpenditure of effort relative to the standard theoretical predictions. Identifying subjects through photo display decreases wasteful effort. Providing information feedback about others’ effort does not affect the aggregate effort, but it decreases the heterogeneity of effort and significantly affects the dynamics of individual behavior. A behavioral model that incorporates a nonmonetary utility of winning and relative payoff maximization explains significant overexpenditure of effort. It also suggests that decrease in “social distance” between group members through social identification promotes prosocial behavior and decreases overexpenditure of effort, while improved information feedback decreases the heterogeneity of effort.

We investigated the impacts of three sorting techniques on various cognitive tasks performed on a tabular representation. The tasks under study were a multi-attribute object selection task and selected low-level analytic tasks.Three sorting techniques, including sorting by a column (Typical Sort: TS), sorting by all columns simultaneously (SimulSort: SS), and sorting by all columns with faithful vertical locations (ParallelTable: PT), were compared with a static table without the sorting feature (Baseline: B). An incentivized controlled laboratory study with 80 participants and a preliminary eye-tracker study were conducted to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the four different approaches. We found that SimulSort and ParallelTable significantly improved the performance of multi-attribute object selection. ParallelTable, however, suffers from an occlusion problem, so it is not an appropriate support for some low-level analytic tasks. We used the findings to propose appropriate sorting techniques for specific tasks performed on a table.