Behavioral public policy (with applications to finance)

Consumers’ decisions often appear suboptimal, especially in the domain of finance. How can we measure decision quality, and what helps improve decisions? What are our biases when judging whether others’ decisions might be mistaken and when deciding about policies to improve decisions? In his inaugural lecture, Sandro Ambühl answered these questions, both in the financial domain and beyond.
Sandro Ambühl was appointed to the Assistant Professorship of the Behavioral Economics of Financial Markets, endowed by the UBS center, in 2020. His work focuses on behavioral economics and the quality of decision making. It relies on both behavioral experiments and economic theory.
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[@Llampalleq]

Very interesting your research. This has brought a few questions.
1) By saying in the second question “20 dollars”, are you not establishing an anchor? Wouldn’t be there an anchoring effect inducing people to respond to numbers close to 20 and then overestimate the difference (the left tail of the distribution)?
2) Why does the education that teaches people to better understand compound interest lead to worse decisions?
You said: “what would good education do: it would make those people who undervalue the investment, undervalue it less, and it would make those people who overvalue the investment, overvalue it less,, what does education actually do when we don't have people practice…it just basically tells everybody compound interest is more powerful than you previously thought and people get that message even if they overestimated compound interest from the start, and we induce those people to make worse decisions…” Did those who overestimated the investment end up underestimating it?
3) Regarding egg donation, payment limits might work as reservation salaries: not alluring good workers to enter the market if they are too low. That will cause an adverse selection problem, which in this case means that only the “bad eggs” will be collected.
4) About the insects-eating experiment. Have you regarded that the driver for picking each video (the “may” and the “may not”) might be cognitive dissonance? Those who were paid only 3 dollars will see eating bugs as not justifying the burden and so will seek the confirming video (the “may not”). Those who were paid 30 dollars not to experience dissonance will want to see the “may” video so as to justify that the experience is not so unpleased.
5) I found it very interesting and powerful that you demonstrated that policymakers will pursue their own preferences rather than the other’s well-being at making decisions, what you called projective paternalism.