EXPRESS: From Paper to Pixels: Challenges and Research Opportunities for Designing Electronic Financial Disclosures

This research explores opportunities to (re)design financial information disclosures for electronic environments to increase their efficacy and improve consumer outcomes. Consumers increasingly interact with financial products and services using online or mobile technology, yet policies addressing electronic disclosures rarely recognize that consumers’ attention, information processing, and engagement differ in digital environments versus the paper-based systems under which most disclosures were designed. To address this policy need, the authors call for research examining financial information provision in electronic environments relevant for disclosure policy. To facilitate this goal, the authors first develop an integrative conceptual framework for understanding consumer information processing in interactive electronic environments. The framework highlights how electronic devices and digitally-enabled capabilities—such as dynamic interactivity, real-time information customization, and flexible delivery time and location—can affect consumer interactions with disclosed information and downstream outcomes. Second, the authors highlight three major, well-established challenges facing financial disclosures (limited attention and engagement; information complexity and overload; and consumer estimation and perceptual errors) and discuss how electronic information environments can exacerbate those challenges or serve to alleviate them. This leads to an actionable research agenda that motivates scholarship on electronic disclosure design and its impact on consumer well-being.