B. LAREAU, C. PRINZ, L. SCHERGER, A. STAHL, K. THOMAS, K. WHITE
INTERVIEW DATA:
“My parents didn't teach me much about savings.”
“I learned small things from him [my dad] but not really more than I should've.”
“I learned saving on my own, my mom just said save money and don't spend it.”
MISSION:
Enable parents to prepare their children for financial independence using allowance as an educational tool
WHY/HOW/WHAT:
Smart Allowance dynamically introduces rewards and incentives to teach children how to handle their finances responsibly; an educational experience as unique as themselves
Purchased spending data
USAA member spending/saving data
→
Cluster analysis of spending/saving behavior combined with domain expert advice
A/B test rewards/incentives for kids
DATA:
- Purchase a data set about how parents allocate money for their children
- The user’s previous spending habits - what the child has spent and what the parent has given the child
- Pre-training will need to be done on the advice giving system to identify categories of spenders and give personalized
- Removes the human work of creating and curating sample budgets. Only one to two screens to adjust settings for the parents. Simple ML curated choices are presented
ETHICAL QUESTIONS:
- Are we fostering a dependence on an application they might not have in the future?
- What if the app gives poor advice to the parents or gives the wrong advice for a certain situation?
- What if the app never reaches an ‘equilibrium state’ of healthy spending and kids are getting cycled through different spending profiles?
- Who decides what good advice is?
- What happens if the software provides really bad advice?
- Is there a way to game this system to cheat out rewards with suboptimal spending habits (ex. Spending poorly one week and very well the next to claim a reward that requires huge changes in progress)
- Are we breeding children that will become obsessed with money/greedy?
- Does our product focus so much on rewards that no attention is spent on actually learning