Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice

We examine methods for evaluating interventions designed to improve decision-making quality when people misunderstand the consequences of their choices. In an experiment involving financial education, conventional outcome metrics (financial literacy and directional behavioral responses) imply that two are equally beneficial even though only one reduces average severity errors. trace these failures violations assumptions embedded in metrics. propose a simple, intuitive, broadly applicable metric properly differentiates between interventions, is robustly interpretable as measure welfare loss from misunderstanding additional biases distort (JEL D83, D91, G51, G53)