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The Behavioral Finance Forum, an organization dedicated to helping consumers make better financial decisions, will become an initiative of RAND Labor and Population, which includes the recently created RAND Center for Financial Decisionmaking.
Center for Financial and Economic Decision Making
The Center for Financial and Economic Decision Making (CFED) is housed within RAND Labor and Population. Ongoing research at CFED addresses the process of financial decision making over the life-cycle, in particular assessing how people collect information, how they interpret the features of alternatives, how they think about risks and probabilities, what their preferences are, and how well they match their decisions to those preferences and interests.
To support this research into financial decision making, RAND has invested heavily in infrastructure that can be used in a wide variety of applications, the centerpiece of which is the American Life Panel (ALP). The ALP is an Internet panel of 2000 respondents (projected to grow to 2000) age 18 or over who are surveyed about once a month with in-depth questions about some key issues. The questionnaires have included questions that focus on information gathering habits, presentation effects, preferences, and cognitive skills. The environment facilitates extensive survey experimentation, aiming for optimal presentation of information to respondents, gauged through the use of visual displays, requests for feedback to and from respondents, and letting them play investment games to study how people make financial decisions. Since inception in 2006 we have fielded more than 30 short surveys, partly in the area of financial decision making and partly in other fields including the effect of political events on self-reported well-being, inflation expectations, joint retirement decisions, retirement preferences, health decision making, Social Security knowledge and expectations, measurement of health utility, and numeracy. In the area of financial decision-making we have fielded surveys on financial literacy, the use of financial advisors and planning, old age pension provisions, and mutual fund fees and investor choices.
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