Research Design: This pilot study examines whether exposure to “responsible crypto investment” nudge (against “practical investment” nudge as control) and regulator’s warning as “counter-nudge” (link to SFC’s public warning vs. the company website) would change the respondent’s attitude or interest towards cryptocurrency and test if individual attribute (say one’s information literacy score) plays a role in any observed differences. One hundred and forty eight college students were recruited to join this survey experiment and were randomly assigned into four groups: Group 1 - “responsible” nudge with regulator warning; Group 2 - “responsible” nudge without regulator warning; Group 3 - “practical” nudge with regulator warning; Group 4 - “practical” nudge without regulator warning.

Result: Interactions between “nudge” exposure and regulator warning seem to result in various attitude and interest towards crypto. When crypto is framed as “practical investment”, users ignore the regulator warning and even gain attitude and interest; whereas when crypto is framed as “responsible investment”, users pay attention to the regulation warning and reduce attitude and interest. The respondent’s information literacy score has been controlled in the analysis. Moreover, even though only for those who clicked into the link, the results persist.

Preliminary observation: This pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of “nudge” and “counter-nudge” manipulations in a survey experimental design. which can lead to statistically significant results despite small and homogeneous sample. A large-scale study is warranted.

Manipulation of Two “nudges”

Exposure to 'Responsible Investment' nudge

Exposure to ‘Responsible Investment’ nudge

Exposure to 'Practical Investment' nudge

Exposure to ‘Practical Investment’ nudge

Manipulation of Two “counter-nudges”

SFC warns public of Tokencan, VBIT Exchange and HKD.com Corporation for suspected virtual asset-related fraud and/or unlicensed activities

https://apps.sfc.hk/edistributionWeb/gateway/EN/news-and-announcements/news/doc?refNo=24PR113

Tokencan company’s website

https://www.tokencane.com/

Outcome variables:

Attitude: What is your overall attitude toward cryptocurrency investment?

Interest: Do you agree that the company shown in the social media post is a reliable service provider?

Independent variables:

Link - Exposure to a link to SFC’s public warning about “Tokencan”

Responsible - nudging of “responsible investment”

ilit_score - information literacy score

Summary of the regression models

summary(lm(Attitude ~ link + responsible + link*responsible + ilt_score, data=a)) # outcome variable: attitude towards crypto 
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = Attitude ~ link + responsible + link * responsible + 
##     ilt_score, data = a)
## 
## Residuals:
##      Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
## -2.24281 -0.24281  0.03359  0.34113  2.34113 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                    Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)         2.91870    0.19498  14.969   <2e-16 ***
## link1               0.41072    0.19023   2.159   0.0325 *  
## responsible1        0.30753    0.18245   1.686   0.0941 .  
## ilt_score          -0.08661    0.06542  -1.324   0.1877    
## link1:responsible1 -0.54125    0.26591  -2.035   0.0437 *  
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 0.8 on 143 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.04428,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.01754 
## F-statistic: 1.656 on 4 and 143 DF,  p-value: 0.1635
summary(lm(Interest ~ link + responsible + link*responsible + ilt_score, data=a)) # outcome variable: interest in crypto
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = Interest ~ link + responsible + link * responsible + 
##     ilt_score, data = a)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -1.7479 -0.6750 -0.2508  0.7379  2.2521 
## 
## Coefficients:
##                    Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)        22.21698    0.24608  90.284   <2e-16 ***
## link1               0.38111    0.24009   1.587   0.1146    
## responsible1        0.46327    0.23026   2.012   0.0461 *  
## ilt_score           0.02254    0.08257   0.273   0.7853    
## link1:responsible1 -0.61066    0.33561  -1.820   0.0709 .  
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 1.01 on 143 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.03184,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.004754 
## F-statistic: 1.176 on 4 and 143 DF,  p-value: 0.3241

Interaction Plots