2014
DOI: 10.3982/ecta11991
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Understanding Mechanisms Underlying Peer Effects: Evidence From a Field Experiment on Financial Decisions

Abstract: Using a high-stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both because they learn from his choice ("social learning") and because his possession of the asset directly affects others' utility of owning the same asset ("social utility"). We randomize whether one member of a peer pair… Show more

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Cited by 391 publications
(43 citation statements)
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“…Empirically, our paper is most closely related to Bursztyn et al (2014) and Zhang and Liu (2012). Bursztyn et al (2014) examine investor behaviour in a randomized controlled experiment working closely with a large financial brokerage in Brazil.…”
Section: Related Literaturementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Empirically, our paper is most closely related to Bursztyn et al (2014) and Zhang and Liu (2012). Bursztyn et al (2014) examine investor behaviour in a randomized controlled experiment working closely with a large financial brokerage in Brazil.…”
Section: Related Literaturementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Several longitudinal studies (Christakis & Fowler, 2007;Christakis & Fowler, 2008;Fowler & Christakis, 2009) have shown that a change in behavior by a member of one's peer network increases the likelihood of a future, similar change in one's own behavior, and a recent field study (Bursztyn et al, 2014) has shown that receiving information about a friend or family member's engagement in a particular risk dramatically influences participants' own decisions about the risk.…”
mentioning
confidence: 98%
“…Importantly, our model of ideal eye movements is automatically crowdsourced rather than provided a priori by the instructor with experts' help. This means that the debiasing effect we obtained relies on "learning from peers" (Bursztyn, Ederer, Ferman, & Yuchtman, 2014;Foucault & Fresard, 2014), instead of costly expert guidance. Thus, a potential future implementation of the proposed technique in a realworld setting is likely to be comparatively cheap, despite allowing for the provision of frequent, individual process feedback.…”
Section: Potential Applicationsmentioning
confidence: 99%