Behavioral Insights into Financial Decision Making

Dear Colleagues,

Understanding the psychological, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of financial decision making is increasingly vital for both scholars and practitioners. Traditional models rooted in rational choice often fall short in capturing the complexities of real-world financial behavior. This Special Issue seeks to advance research at the intersection of finance, psychology, and behavioral economics, with a focus on how individuals and households make financial decisions across a range of contexts.

A growing dimension of this field is the influence of digital technologies, from mobile banking apps and robo-advisors to algorithm-driven credit scoring and gamified investment platforms. These tools reshape decision-making environments by altering information flows, choice architecture, and the speed of transactions, often amplifying existing cognitive biases or creating new behavioral patterns. Understanding the interaction between human decision processes and digital interfaces is essential to designing interventions that improve financial outcomes.

This Special Issue invites original research and reviews exploring themes such as cognitive biases, heuristics, risk perception, emotional influences, and financial literacy, as well as the ways these factors operate in increasingly digital financial ecosystems. Submissions may address decision making across saving, spending, borrowing, investing, retirement planning, or responses to financial shocks, whether in traditional settings or technology-mediated contexts.

By deepening our understanding of behavioral drivers in finance, this Special Issue aims to inform more effective financial policy, product design, and education initiatives. We welcome diverse methodological approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives that contribute to a more nuanced understanding of financial decision making in practice.

Prof. Dr. Aaron Gilbert
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Financial Studies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.