Understanding the Advice of Commissions-Motivated Agents: Evidence from the Indian Life Insurance Market
通过实地实验发现，印度人寿保险代理人普遍推荐高佣金但不适合客户的产品，迎合客户错误信念，且佣金披露政策导致代理人转向未披露的高佣金产品。
We conduct a series of field experiments to evaluate the quality of advice provided by life insurance agents in India. Agents overwhelmingly recommend unsuitable, strictly dominated products that provide high commissions to the agent. Agents cater to the beliefs of uninformed consumers, even when those beliefs are wrong. We also find that agents appear to focus on maximizing the amount of premiums (and therefore their commissions) that customers pay, as opposed to focusing on how much insurance coverage customers need. A natural experiment requiring disclosure of commissions for a specific product results in agents recommending alternative products with high commissions but no disclosure requirement. A follow-up agent survey sheds light on the extent to which poor advice reflects both the commission incentives and agents’ limited product knowledge.