Gain-Loss Framing and Feedback Visibility in Financial Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Randomized Experiment

Last registered on August 24, 2026

View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Gain-Loss Framing and Feedback Visibility in Financial Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Randomized Experiment

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0019449

Initial registration date

August 19, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

August 24, 2026, 9:16 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Slovakia

Region

Bratislava

Primary Investigator

Name

Ioana - Florina Coita

Affiliation

University of Economics and Business in Bratislava

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2026-08-07

End date

2026-08-31

Keywords

Behavior, Finance & Microfinance, Lab

Additional Keywords

risk perception, financial decision-making, framing effect, behavioral and psychological factors, Credit repayment; household finance; behavioral finance; financial decisionmaking; financial stress; loss framing; feedback; credit scoring; impulsivity; online experiment; experimental economics;

JEL code(s)

C91 — Laboratory, Individual Behavior D91 — Intertemporal Household Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving G51 — Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth

Secondary IDs

Funded by the EU NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Slovakia under the project No. 09I03-03-V04-00502, Companion online trial: "Gain-Loss Framing and Feedback Visibility in Financial Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Laboratory Experiment" — AEA RCT Registry. Earlier related design (research program precursor): "Neurocognitive Pathways to Risk: Affective Priming and Prediction Error in Dynamic Credit Simulation," OSF Registration, registered November 25, 2025. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/RD9AY. https://osf.io/rd9ay/

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

This study investigates how individuals perceive and respond to financial risk under uncertainty, using an incentivized 24-month simulated personal loan repayment task. Participants recruited via Prolific are randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2×2 between-subjects factorial design, crossing (a) outcome framing (the same financial information presented as gains vs. as losses) and (b) visibility of a running performance score (displayed vs. hidden) throughout the task. Each simulated month, participants decide how much to repay toward a fixed loan installment while managing income, expenses, and a sequence of life events common to all conditions. Behavioral outcomes — repayment amount, overdraft usage, and a composite monthly performance score — are recorded automatically each month. Participants complete a psychometric questionnaire before and after the task. The study examines whether framing and feedback visibility causally affect repayment behavior and risk-taking (overdraft use) over time, and exploratorily examines whether individual differences in psychological traits moderate these effects. An earlier version of this study was pre-registered on OSF under the name of
Neurocognitive Pathways to Risk: Affective Priming and Prediction Error in Dynamic Credit Simulation, here: https://osf.io/rd9ay/overview. The companion study performed in laboratory is named "Gain-Loss Framing and Feedback Visibility in Financial Decision- Making Under Uncertainty: A Laboratory Experiment" also registered both AEA RCT Registry and OSF.

External Link(s)

earlier OSF registration

Registration Citation

Citation

Coita, Ioana - Florina. 2026. "Gain-Loss Framing and Feedback Visibility in Financial Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Randomized Experiment." AEA RCT Registry. August 24. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.19449-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Interventions

Intervention(s)

The intervention consists of two orthogonal treatment manipulations embedded in a 24-
month simulated personal loan repayment task administered online via Prolific:
(1) Framing manipulation: The financial information shown to participants each month
(income, expenses, loan balance, interest, and running totals) is presented using either
gain-framed language (emphasizing what participants retain, save, or gain) or lossframed
language (emphasizing what participants owe, lose, or fall short of). The
underlying numerical values are identical across both framing conditions — only the
presentation differs.
(2) Feedback visibility manipulation: After each monthly decision, participants either see
(displayed condition) or do not see (hidden condition) their running composite
performance score.
Each participant is randomly assigned to exactly one combination of these two
manipulations (four arms: gain/displayed, gain/hidden, loss/displayed, loss/hidden) and
remains in that condition for the entire 24-month task.

Intervention Start Date

2026-08-07

Intervention End Date

2026-08-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

(1) Monthly loan repayment amount relative to the scheduled installment; (2) overdraft
usage (amount and duration) over the 24-month task; (3) composite monthly financialdecision
score (repayment, liquidity, and overdraft sub-scores).

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Self-reported post-task stress, perceived difficulty, and realism of the task. Exploratory
analyses will examine whether individual differences in psychological traits (e.g.,
impulsivity, emotion regulation, general wellbeing) moderate the effect of framing and/or
feedback visibility on behavioral outcomes; no directional prediction is made a priori
given the exploratory, hypothesis-generating nature of this line of inquiry.

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

A 2×2 between-subjects factorial design randomly assigns participants to one of four
conditions crossing outcome framing (gain vs. loss) and score feedback visibility
(displayed vs. hidden). After a pre-task psychometric questionnaire, participants
complete 24 simulated monthly decisions in a personal loan repayment scenario, facing
an identical sequence of income, expenses, and narrative life events across all
conditions—only the framing of the presented numbers and the visibility of the score
differ by condition. A post-task questionnaire assesses perceived task stress, difficulty,
and realism.

Experimental Design Details

Not available

Randomization Method

Randomization done by computer. Upon starting the study, the online platform
automatically and randomly assigns each participant to one of the four experimental
conditions (2×2 design) with equal probability (25% each), using the platform's built-in
random assignment function.

Randomization Unit

Individual participant. There is a single level of randomization — no group-, session-, or
cluster-level assignment is used; each participant is independently and randomly
assigned to one of the four conditions.

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

400 participants

Sample size: planned number of observations

400 participants

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

100 participants gain-framing/score displayed, 100 participants gain-framing/score
hidden, 100 participants loss-framing/score displayed, 100 participants lossframing/
score hidden

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

We power the study to detect a minimum standardized effect size of d=0.4 (a small-to medium effect by Cohen's conventions).

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name

University of Economics and Business in Bratislava

IRB Approval Date

2026-01-15

IRB Approval Number

N/A

Analysis Plan