Footnote:
In: FCA Occasional Paper No. 26
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments April 25, 2017 erstellt
Description:
How are we affected by financial advertising? What do we pay attention to and when might we be misled? We explore the science of advertising to answer these questions. Building on earlier FCA work into behavioural biases, we summarise a large body of academic literature to explore the mechanisms behind consumer attention, understanding, and behaviour. We build this into a framework for understanding how consumers process information in the form of advertisements, divided into three stages: See, Interpret and Act. We then apply our findings in a novel setting: explaining what the science says about when an advert may be unclear, unfair or misleading.In See, we find that attention may be predicted by the relative salience of information and is also affected by consumers' motivation and intentions; for example, those searching for a house are more likely to notice mortgage deals. In Interpret, we find that certain ways of presenting information, particularly those which make use of behavioural biases or which involve percentages may impede understanding and have the potential to mislead consumers in certain circumstances. In Act, we see that consumers may be influenced into action through techniques which encourage reliance on heuristics or emotion, rather than reason, and that this may cause problems.Throughout, we offer fictitious examples of adverts to illustrate the behavioural points we observe and we suggest further areas for research which can guide our actions