Hal Hershfield
Featured Keynote Programs
Behavioral Finance
What are the errors that investors and everyday decision-makers commonly make, and how can we overcome them? Over the last several decades, behavioral finance research has identified a number of psychological stumbling blocks that result in costly mistakes. In this talk, I review the behavioral shortcuts that affect financial decisions (including, but not limited to overconfidence errors, confirmation bias, the availability bias, and the sunk cost bias). I then review a variety of solutions that can help investors overcome these biases.
How Considerations of the Future Self Affect Financial Decisions in the Digital Era
One of the most pressing challenges facing Americans is how best to balance immediate gratification and longer-term well-being. Such “intertemporal tradeoffs” guide a number of financial decisions, including saving for college, unforeseen medical expenses, and retirement. Previous research has tried to understand these problems by focusing on how people treat present and future rewards. Here, I review a growing body of work that takes a different approach, looking at how individuals perceive the relationship between their current and future selves. Specifically, I first briefly overview previous research that speaks to the sort of emotional connections people feel to their future selves, and how a lack of emotional connection to one’s future self can affect consequential financial outcomes such as the accrual of assets and savings. I discuss a number of different techniques that have been employed to help close the gap between current and future selves in an effort to increase saving behavior, spotlighting interventions that have been carried out in digital contexts.