Behavioral Nudges in Finance: A Review and Future Research Agenda

ABSTRACT

This study provides a systematic synthesis of the emerging literature on behavioral nudges in financial decision‐making within increasingly complex and digitalized environments. Although prior reviews have examined specific financial contexts, a comprehensive and integrative account remains lacking. Addressing this gap, the study reviews 66 peer‐reviewed articles from Web of Science and Scopus, employing the SPAR‐4‐SLR protocol and organizing insights through a combined Antecedents–Decisions–Outcomes (ADO) and Theory–Context–Method (TCM) framework. The analysis identifies a core set of behavioral interventions—defaults, framing, informational cues, reminders, and social norms—as dominant across financial domains, while systematically mapping 19 antecedents, 24 decision types, and 19 outcomes into higher‐order categories. Beyond classification, the review reveals structural imbalances in the literature, including a concentration of evidence in limited institutional and geographical contexts, and a reliance on a narrow set of theoretical perspectives. By integrating dispersed findings, the study advances a more generalizable understanding of how nudges operate through the interaction of individual, informational, and environmental factors. It further develops a research agenda that emphasizes theoretical diversification, contextual expansion, and the need for more rigorous empirical and experimental designs, thereby contributing to the evolution of behavioral finance scholarship.