Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making - 2024

Conference Information for all attendees

We are looking forward to your arrival at the conference.  We have a terrific program planned!  Here are a few housekeeping details for all attendees. 

1. Pre-conference fun

Saturday Happy Hour at Rayback Collective:  For those arriving early, John Lynch will be hosting a welcome happy hour at Rayback Collective (2775 Valmont Rd, Boulder, CO 80304), from 4:00-6:00 on Saturday May 11^th. We would love to see you there. Please email Nick (nicholas.reinholtz@colorado.edu) with any questions.

Sunday Morning Hike:  One of the Boulder faculty will be leading a hike on Sunday morning, leaving from the lobby of the St. Julien. This is a wonderful opportunity to see some of Colorado’s natural beauty and to spend time with fellow conference-goers. Locals will provide transport in their personal cars. Look for an email in the coming days with logistical details and sign-up information.

2. Receptions and Meals

Breakfast: Full breakfast will be provided on both Monday and Tuesday from 7:00-8:00 outside of the main ballroom.

Lunches and Dinners: You are on your own for lunch and dinner. There are many great restaurants walking distance from the St. Julie. Rosetta Hall is a food hall with many options, 1 block up Walnut Street, which is popular with conference goers. 

Receptions: On Sunday, directly after the Keynote panel discussion we will have a reception along with the poster session outside of the ballroom and on the terrace (weather permitting). On Monday after the plenary sessions conclude we will have another reception in the same location featuring one of Colorado’s best bluegrass bands. For both events, drink tickets will be found in your name badge and light hors d'oeuvres will be served.

Coffee: Coffee will be served continuously throughout the day, and we will also have dedicated coffee breaks throughout the program.

3. Dress code: We are a pretty casual bunch in Boulder in the summer so feel free to wear whatever you find comfortable. Jeans, polo shirts and casual dresses are typical.

We can’t wait to see you in Boulder,

Tony and Phil

Information for Plenary and Poster Presenters

Information for Plenary Presenters and Discussants: 

We are looking forward to hearing about your research at our conference.

1. When you come to registration (1:00 to 2:00 on Sunday, May 12^th) we will have a separate desk for you and other presenters to copy your presentation from your memory stick onto our computers so we have files set up for each session.  Please show up by 1:15 PM to be sure we have time for this.  Our IT folks will test your presentation to be sure that it looks right on our computers.

2. Each plenary session runs for 1 hour and 15 minutes, with two papers (25 minutes each) and a discussant (10 minutes), followed by 15 minutes of discussion.  This allocated time per speaker includes time for (very brief) intros, plus the time for each presenter to get up and down from the stage, fiddle with PowerPoint, etc. Thus, realistically, paper presenters should plan for a 22-minute talk uninterrupted and discussants for 8 minutes of remarks, uninterrupted. The fifteen-minute discussion period is just as important as the presentations, in our view and so we are ruthless (!!) at this conference about staying on time. Discussants, at this conference we have a very broad audience, so the discussant’s critical role is to surface high level takeaways rather than to do a technical drill-down (or negative critique). In the discussion period, it is not necessary for all three people on the stage to respond to each question. We want as many audience members as possible to get a chance to ask their questions.

3. Some of you have font sizes on your slides that are difficult to read from the back of the room. It would be great if you would review your slides and make changes with that in mind. In general, we would like your font sizes to be at least 24-point in all probability.

Information for Poster Presenters

We are looking forward to having you kick off our conference with the poster session on Sunday, May 12^th from 4:30 to 6:30. It will immediately follow the opening keynote and panel discussion.

The poster session will be located where people can get a glass of wine and stroll from poster to poster to learn about your very interesting work.

Each of you will have a space that is 46 inches wide by 48 inches high (116.8 cm. wide x 121.9 cm high).  The brackets on either side of each poster take a little real estate, giving you a rectangle rather than a square.  We will have a time for you to set up your poster in the packet pickup hour before the conference starts (1:00 to 2:00 PM). Please come at 1:00 so you’ll have plenty of time to set up your poster before we start the conference.

Some people may choose to have a 1-page sheet to distribute to people visiting your poster as a takeaway.

Boulder Summer Conference Overview

The Boulder Summer Conference in Consumer Financial Decision Making, now in its 15th year, is the world’s foremost conference for discussion of interdisciplinary research on consumer financial decision making. Consumer welfare is strongly affected by household financial decisions large and small: choosing mortgages; saving to fund college education or retirement; using credit cards to fund current consumption; choosing how to “decumulate” savings in retirement; deciding how to pay for health care and insurance; and investing in the stock market, managing debt in the face of financial distress. This conference brings together outstanding scholars from around the world in a unique interdisciplinary conversation with regulators, business people in financial services, and consumer advocates working on problems of consumer financial decision making.

Our goal is to stimulate cross-disciplinary conversation and improve basic and applied research in the emerging area of consumer financial decision making. This research can inform our understanding of how consumers actually make such decisions and how consumers can be helped to make better decisions by innovations in public policy, business, and consumer education. Please see the past programs on the conference website to see abstracts of research by scholars in economics, psychology, sociology, behavioral finance, consumer research, decision sciences, behavioral economics, and law. Our format allows a very high level of opportunity for conversation and interaction around the ideas presented.

Conference Format

We begin with a keynote session late Sunday afternoon followed by reception and poster session. Monday and Tuesday we have a selection of 75-minute plenary sessions with two related papers from different disciplines, with discussion by an industry or government expert or a scholar from a third field.  We begin with financial decision making of consumers in distress because of poor financial decision making or situational stress.  We then turn our focus to more basic processes that guide everyday consumer financial decision-making, both good and bad. Throughout the conference we schedule significant time for informal interaction outside of the sessions.

The conference program committee will select papers for presentation at the conference based on extended abstracts. Selected papers must not be published prior to the conference.  Authors submitting an abstract must commit to have a paper that is complete and available for review by discussants one month prior to the conference. Selections will be based on quality, relevance to consumers' financial decision-making, and contribution to breadth of topics and disciplinary approaches. We consider not just the individual merits of the papers, but how they pair with another submission from a scholar in a different field. The organizers will invite authors of the best papers not selected for presentation at a plenary session to present their work at the Sunday evening poster session.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado and by the Leeds School of Business.