Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Business Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Finance and Financial Management

Series

2015

Amortization bias

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Business

Exponential Growth Bias Matters: Evidence And Implications For Financial Decision Making Of College Students In The U.S.A., Bryan Foltice, Thomas Langer May 2015

Exponential Growth Bias Matters: Evidence And Implications For Financial Decision Making Of College Students In The U.S.A., Bryan Foltice, Thomas Langer

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

This paper tests the exponential growth bias of undergraduate students at a top-level university in the United States and explores the potential drivers of this bias. We find that bias matters, even for college students, in making savings and debt decisions. In this sample, we observe that the individuals who have already taken on debt are more biased, while those who have experience with savings products are less biased. Moreover, those classified as possessing an awareness of compound growth as well as an ability to consistently calculate the compound savings equation are significantly less biased in different savings treatments than …


How To Decrease The Amortization Bias: Experience Vs. Rules, Bryan Foltice May 2015

How To Decrease The Amortization Bias: Experience Vs. Rules, Bryan Foltice

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

We conduct an experimental study that tests the effectiveness of de-biasing a certain form of exponential growth bias found in household finance debt decisions, called the amortization bias. We provide 251 bachelor students at a German university with a short tutorial based on one of three learning methods: experiential learning, learning a simple “I Owe More” debt rule-of-thumb, as well as learning an extended, but more accurate version of the “I Owe More” debt rule. Immediately after completing these tutorials, we retest for the amortization bias and find a significant bias improvement in all three treatments. More importantly, after confronting …