Unshrouding product-specific attributes through financial education

Abstract

Financial product-specific knowledge is increasingly necessary for households to make informed choices, especially as firms often shroud important features. In a field experiment with a sub-optimal, shrouded insurance product in India, we test two product-specific education interventions: one based on rules of thumb and the other combining rules of thumb with explicit product evaluation. We find that rules-of-thumb education significantly improves financial decisions, while explicit product evaluation appears to counteract these positive effects. To assess the economic significance of our findings, we redefine successful financial education as achieving a Pareto-efficient outcome—ensuring that gains for newly educated consumers do not come at the expense of uninformed consumers. Our estimated effects, along with the modest positive treatment effects documented elsewhere, may result in too few informed consumers, potentially rendering such interventions ineffective.