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Tens of millions of people are currently choosing health coverage on a state or federal health insurance exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We examine how well people make these choices, how well they think they do, and what can be done to improve these choices. We conducted 6 experiments asking people to choose the most cost-effective policy using websites modeled on current exchanges. Our results suggest there is significant room for improvement. Without interventions, respondents perform at near chance levels and show a significant bias, overweighting out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles. Financial incentives do not improve performance, and decision-makers do not realize that they are performing poorly. However, performance can be improved quite markedly by providing calculation aids, and by choosing a “smart” default. Implementing these psychologically based principles could save purchasers of policies and taxpayers approximately 10 billion dollars every year.

Whereas the literature evaluating the effect of tort reforms has focused on reported incurred losses, this paper examines the long run effects using a comprehensive sample by state of individual firms writing medical malpractice insurance from 1984-2003. The long run effects of reforms are greater than insurers' expected effects, as five year developed losses and ten year developed losses are below the initially reported incurred losses for those years following reform measures. The quantile regressions show the greatest effects of joint and several liability limits, noneconomic damages caps, and punitive damages reforms for the firms that are at the high end of the loss distribution. These quantile regression results show stronger, more concentrated effects of the reforms than do the OLS and fixed effects estimates for the entire sample.

Consumers are widely adopting Artificially Intelligent Voice Assistants (AIVAs). AIVAs now handle many different everyday tasks and are also increasingly assisting consumers with purchasing decisions, making AIVAs a rich topic for marketing researchers. We develop a series of propositions regarding how consumer decision-making processes may change when moved from traditional online purchase environments to AI-powered voicebased dialogs, in the hopes of encouraging further academic thinking and research in this rapidly developing, high impact area of consumer-firm interaction. We also provide suggestions for marketing managers and policymakers on points to pay attention to when they respond to the proposed effects of AIVAs on consumer decisions. Keywords Artificial intelligence. Voice assistants. Consumer decision-making. Consumer dialogs. Digital marketing. Consumer models Artificially Intelligent interactive Voice Assistants (AIVAs), also known as Voice-Activated Personal Assistants or Smart-Home Personal Assistants, have become widely adopted by consumers as aids in a variety of everyday tasks. AIVAs currently handle over one billion tasks per month, with the majority of uses being simple information requests ("Cortana, what is the weather today?") or household commands ("Ok Google, turn on the lights.").

of thousands of individual actors. This essay identifies the core components of robo advisors, key questions that regulators need to be able to answer about them, and the capacities that regulators need to develop in order to answer those questions. The benefits to developing these capacities almost certainly exceed the costs, because the same returns to scale that make an automated advisor so cost-effective lead to similar returns to scale in assessing the quality of automated advisors.The growth of investment robo-advisors, web-based insurance exchanges, on-line credit comparison sites, and automated personal financial management services creates significant opportunities and risks for consumers that regulators across the financial services spectrum have yet even to assess, let alone address. Because of the scale that automation makes possible, these services have the potential to provide quality financial advice to more people at lower cost than Baker is William Maul Measey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Dellaert is Professor, 1 Department of Business Economics, Marketing Section, School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Baker is a co-founder of Picwell, a data analytics company that makes insurance robo advisors, and Dellaert is a member of the board of supervisors (Raad van Toezicht) of Independer.nl, the largest on-line insurance broker in the Netherlands. Thanks to Grace Knofcyzinski and Luman Yu for helpful research assistance.! 1 humans, and to do so with greater transparency. But the fact that this potential exists hardly 2 3 guarantees that it will be realized.People design, model, program, implement, and market these automated advisors, and many automated advisors operate behind the scenes, assisting people who interact with clients and customers. The history of people taking advantage of consumers in the financial services industry is not a pretty one. Even setting fraud and other unsavory activities to the side, the 4 riches to be won by those who succeed in "disrupting" the financial services industry provide more than enough incentive to rush technology to market. In addition, there are concerns that (encouraging UK financial services regulators to take steps to promote the development of automated financial advice to increase access to financial advice). Cf. FINRA, supra note 6 at 8-9 (listing many good governance practices for FINRA members to employ in relation to digital investment advisors). All or most of the governance practices FINRA describes could also form the basis for external evaluation. are more specific to automated advice. These include developing the capacities to assess: the algorithms and data incorporated in the automated advisors; the choice architecture through which the advice is presented and acted upon; the underlying information technology infrastructure; and the downside risk from the scale that automation makes possible. Developing these capacities will require financial service authorities -the paradigmatic expert administrative...