Changes in the domain and complexity of consumer decision making raise key challenges for modern societies. Increasingly governments transfer responsibility for complex decisions away from the state towards the individual. The decline of state provision of social insurance and financial security has seen very important decisions, such as over retirement saving and personal protection insurance, become the responsibility of consumers, just as more familiar but often also highly complex decisions are. This project will drive forward scientific understanding of consumer behaviour in the face of difficult choices and of how public policy can intervene most effectively to promote their success. The modern consumer faces decisions of bewildering complexity, with choices to be made between numerous options differing from one another in multiple ways. Consider e.g. all the specifications of mobile phone and new car available in typical modern economies, and all the different pension schemes or insurance products. Besides the number and complexity of the options, consumers face uncertainty e.g. about reliability, service quality or resale value. Even when a great deal of information is available, it may be framed by firms or suppliers in ways intended to induce particular customer responses e.g. via complex utility tariffs or terms and conditions for financial products. Many choices involve consideration of costs and benefits spread over time, e.g. lifestyle and savings decisions, or large consumer durable purchases. Decades of research in behavioural science and psychology, and recent developments in behavioural economics, show that many individuals find even quite simple decisions difficult, are not always consistent, and often behave in ways reflecting biased or poor decision processes. The results can be highly detrimental to consumers concerned and, sometimes, to wider society. Our research programme, drawing on economics and psychology and at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary behavioural science, will advance understanding of consumer behaviour. Theme 1 will study foundations of individual choice, with particular attention to decision processes and consumers' responses to features of their environment. Theme 2 will examine how firms frame and structure environments for actual and potential customers in the light of behavioural characteristics of consumers of varying sophistication. It will focus on how firms' strategies affect and are in turn affected by competition between firms. Understanding this interaction is vital to successful regulation of consumer markets. Theme 2 will also study the form of appropriate regulation directly, in collaboration with UK regulatory bodies. Theme 3 will apply lessons of behavioural science to personal and household financial decision making - an area of consumer behaviour that typifies the combination of choice between multiple, complex products; uncertainty; time; and potential for serious consumer detriment. The work will be carried out by a team that is built out of, and develops, the existing Network for Behavioural Science, the hub of which is a partnership between leading behavioural science groups at the Universities of Nottingham, East Anglia and Warwick. The team will include world-renowned psychologists and economists, emerging scientists and team members with direct experience of consumer market regulation. The team will conduct and publicise research that achieves international academic recognition through publication in top-flight scientific journals and conferences. It will enhance the consumer environment for citizens by influencing policy formulation and consumer market regulation in the UK. By creating new data sets, training and nurturing researchers, and fostering an international research network with links between academics, the private sector and policy makers, the project will increase the research capacity of UK universities in behavioural science.

The Covid-19 pandemic together with the unprecedented and radical economic policy response on the part of government has resulted in severe disruption to consumer finances and small business finances. There is an urgent and timely need to evaluate the extent of disruption and the effectiveness of recent policy innovations. This project will use a new and unique set of real-time, high frequency data available to evalute these far faster can be achieved with traditional ONS data sources. The project involves the creation of a new real-time economic characterisation of consumer and firm behaviour from mass transaction data. Specifically, the work will evaluate impact on consumer finances (reduced incomes, non-payment of debts, patterns of saving and expenditure) and small business finances (turnover and business continuity). The research will be co-produced with four organisations. First, working with the Financial Conduct Authority, the regulator of the consumer financial sector in the UK, to evaluate the impact on consumer indebtedness and evaluate the FCA's policy response, the Consumer Credit (Temporary Covid-19 Support Measures) Order 2020 (CCO220) and the 3 month mortgage forbearnce scheme. Second, working with the National Employee Savings Trust, the largest provider of pensions to low income workers in the UK, to understand the effects on incomes and short-term and long-term saving behaviour. Third, working with the UK's largest financial aggregator app, Moneydashboard, to model the impact of 'lockdown' measures on consumer spending and business survival across sectors. Fourth, working with Natwest to evaluate the impact of the government's Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS). Findings will be presented to policymaker sponsors the researchers will continue to work with policymakers in real-time policy design.

Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study is the largest household panel study in the world, designed to address key scientific and policy questions of the 21st century. It collects high quality annual longitudinal data on individuals of all ages in households representative of the UK population. Such data enable researchers to explore the experiences, causes and consequences of changes in people's lives - their family structure, health, income, expenditure, employment and housing. The Study has additional samples for the detailed exploration of the circumstances of key immigrant and ethnic minority groups; and collects data on cognition, objective measures of health and genetics to understand how people's health and wider circumstances interact. Increasingly we have been able to secure linkage to contextual information for places and organisations, and with consent, to individual level data including administrative records, social media and commercial information. Additionally, the Study experiments with innovative ways of collecting data to continually improve the content and quality of data available. Finally, we invest in supporting researchers and working with policy makers to ensure the research based on these data is used to inform policy and practice. The Study began in 2008 with the Innovation Panel (IP), which tests methods, and the first main wave of fieldwork started in 2009. It builds on and incorporates the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which means for some families we have annual information from 1991. To date, seven waves of the main Study and nine waves of the IP, as well as data collected from a nurse visit, are deposited in the UK Data Service. Data collection and planning are ongoing for Waves 9-11 and IP11-12; IP10 and Wave 8 data will be released in 2018. This bid covers the costs of data collection for Wave 12 of the main Study and IP13 and 14, and associated activities. In Wave 12 we will continue to push web-first data collection within our mixed mode framework to reduce costs while maintaining response rates and data quality. We are funding Methodological Fellowships to support this. Additionally, in IP13 and 14 we will experiment with other ways of collecting and harvesting data - for example between-wave surveys, apps, scanning till receipts - to expand the research opportunities available. We are also reaching out to other potential respondents: those whom we lost in BHPS where we can find them, and the partners of people in the Study who do not live in the same households. Finally, we will be trying to understand why people who emigrant do so by interviewing such groups as they leave the Study, and also we will interview family members when a respondent moves into a care home. Policy and research agendas are constantly evolving, and it is important in a longitudinal study to balance creating long series of the same data with including new questions that address emerging topics. For Wave 12 we are reviewing whether our survey adequately captures the way in which technology impacts on different aspects of our lives. We have appointed a number of experts - Topic Champions - to improve the content of the survey and the way we present the data to users. We also aim to focus on developing our content in childhood, which is limited at present. Supporting researchers in universities, government, third sector and businesses to use the data effectively is fundamental to the success of the Study. We have a Policy Unit that directly works with government departments and third sector organisations to help them use Understanding Society data, and we undertake a wide range of activities to promote findings based on the Study to policy users. We are planning a range of international events to promote effective comparative research, especially in relation to policy analysis using the Study. We are also funding Policy Fellowships to promote the policy impact of the Study.

Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study is the largest household panel study in the world, designed to address key scientific and policy questions of the 21st century. It collects high quality annual longitudinal data on individuals of all ages in households which are representative of the UK population. The Study's data enable researchers to explore the experiences, causes and consequences of changes in people's lives - their family structure, health, income, expenditure, employment and housing. The Study has additional dimensions that enable the detailed exploration of the circumstances of key immigrant and ethnic minority groups; investigation of inter-relations between different family members within and across households and generations; and, it collects direct measures of health and genetics to understand how people's health and wider circumstances interact. It is underpinned by robust and innovative methods, and our methodological research creates learning for other studies nationally and internationally. The Study began in 2008 with the Innovation Panel (IP), which tests methods, and the first main wave of fieldwork started in 2009. It builds on and incorporates the British Household Panel Survey, which means for some families we have data from 1991. To date, eight waves of the main Study and ten waves of the IP, as well as data collected from a nurse visit, are deposited at the UK Data Service. Further waves are in planning, in the field or being prepared for data release. This bid covers plans for data collection for Waves 13-15 and IP15-17 a boost sample to increase the size of the Study, and a range of enhancements. Our long term vision for the Study is for it to be based on integrating the best of all kinds of data on a Longitudinal Core, whilst creating novel research opportunities with new data enhancements. Our plans include more timely data collection of key life changes, such as job loss; a pregnancy study; a repeat collection of biological data. We are investigating ways to enhance our content by collecting data with new technologies. We are also planning to expand the Study to engage with key family members who live outside the household, for example, co-parents in separated families and transnational families. We also plan to broaden the range of data we harvest from external sources, as well as individual administrative records, we are investigating how we can obtain contextual data on organisations, such as employers, and places. As in previous bids, we are proposing advertising a number of fellowships competitions to build capacity in the wider research community to use the unique features of the data. Supporting researchers in universities, government, third sector and businesses to use the data effectively is fundamental to the success of the Study. We provide a wide range of resources, services and support to enable users with different backgrounds and from different kinds of organisations to make effective use of the data. We propose enhancing this further by adding a 'data gateway' to our website so users can select the data they need through a shopping basket system. We have a Policy Unit that works directly with government departments and third sector organisations to help them use Understanding Society data, and we undertake a wide range of activities to promote findings based on the Study to policy users. In this phase the Policy Unit will develop partnerships with different organisations to facilitate policy communities learning from high quality research based on the Study. We plan to continue to promote research from the Study widely through events, publications, briefings, on our website and through social media. Taken together, we firmly believe that the continued collection of data on a longitudinal core and the new data enhancements proposed will significantly increase the high quality impactful research based on the Study and hence its value to society.

BARAC investigates the feasibility of using blockchain technology for automating regulation and compliance producing a proof-of-concept platform and facilitating knowledge transfer by means of a bottom-up cross-disciplinary approach developed together with industry and regulators. Blockchain Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are of great interest to the financial industry because they have the potential to improve efficiency, augment security, eliminate duplications, simplify compliance and increase settlement speed, transparency and verifiability while preserving privacy and anonymity. These technologies are also of great interest to regulators because they provide very powerful auditing tools which can be used for automatic compliance reporting and algorithmic regulation. These technologies introduce several disruptive innovations in this area giving access to auditable data which are hard to tamper with and include both real time and the entire history; providing new instruments to monitor and quantify reputation of users; generating transparent, yet securely encrypted, environments where rules can be implemented enforced and adapted. In this project we investigate technical, legal and managerial aspects related to use of DLT in the services industry including the significance of new business models and their effects on industry structure. BARAC aims to: i) demonstrate that blockchain technologies can be used to acquire and record financial activity data and to securely retrieve them for regulation and compliance purposes; ii) implement a case-study proof-of-concept platform for automatic compliance and algorithmic regulation from blockchain data; iii) transfer knowledge to industry and regulators and disseminate results to academic community and the wider public. This will be achieved by adapting existing DLT systems, such as hyperledger (open source DLT project from Linux Foundation) and Corda (DLT project from R3-CEV for financial applications), to provide access to regulatory and compliance data for regulators and by designing smart contracts that automatically verify and execute regulations using smart contracts. We intend to set up a proof-of-concept platform where the feasibility of using DLT technology for compliance and regulation of financial services can be tested in practice addressing industry-relevant case studies. This platform will be built with a bottom up approach working together with our industry and regulator partners and constructed around their requirements and perspectives. BARAC addresses several challenges that span across many disciplines; therefore a cross-disciplinary effort is essential and indeed this project has gathered together PI and co-Co-Is from five different Departments including Computer Science, Mathematics, Law, Economics, Management and Finance from four different institutions. Together with academia, the proponents' consortium includes regulators, financial industry and the technology sector. This project has the potential to radically change the way in which regulation and compliance are performed essentially reverting the present approach. Firms will no longer have the duty to report to regulators but instead regulators will access auditable data directly from the DLT. This will radically reduce the burden on firms increasing efficiency, transparency and eliminating the risk of unintentional breaching of compliance and regulation rules. The impact will not only be felt on the financial services sector but will also ripple across the entire services sector from healthcare to the food industry and education. Indeed all industries and services are regulated and need to comply by reporting information to the relative authorities and government bodies. It will also have impact upon business models and managerial practices.