The seminar will take place on June 16th, between 11.30 am and 12.30 pm in room EP002.
REGISTER HERE
Registration is mandatory. Please register by June 15th indicating if you will be attending in person or online. The weblink will be emailed to online attendees after registration.
Daniel Schwartz
Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Research, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
Daniel Schwartz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Chile. His research focuses on behavioral science and consumer decision making, with an emphasis on how information design and communication strategies influence decisions in domains such as sustainable consumption, household finance, and healthcare. Much of his recent work relies on large-scale field experiments combined with machine learning, and conducted in collaboration with firms and regulators, to study how consumers respond to incentives, information, and other policy-relevant communications.
He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in data analysis and causal inference, decision-making, behavioral economics, and behavioral finance. He has received multiple university, departmental, and international teaching awards.
Abstract
"The minimum payment warning — a mandatory credit card disclosure in many countries — has been described as a perverse nudge because it may reduce repayments through anchoring bias. This paper introduces a novel "statement balance warning" highlighting the consequences of repaying less than in full. In a large-scale randomized field experiment with 179,706 borrowers, email payment reminders were randomly assigned to four conditions: a minimum payment warning, a statement balance warning, both, or no warning. The statement balance warning increased full repayment by 0.6–0.7 percentage points and reduced revolving interest charges by 6.8–9.0 percent. Causal random forests reveal significant heterogeneous effects: the top 40 percent of cardholders receiving the statement balance warning increased full repayment by up to 2.4 percentage points, particularly those who deliberately vary monthly payments and face a narrower minimum-statement balance gap. The results suggest that cardholders treat warnings as targets rather than anchors, prioritizing the more attainable goal when faced with two salient amounts — providing new evidence on dual-level targets in financial decision-making. An online experiment confirms these findings and shows that the warning improves financial understanding. Based on this evidence, Chile has approved the statement balance warning for inclusion in its new national credit card regulation."