of respondents, (iv) eliciting posterior beliefs, and (v) self-reporting of consumption plans for all respondents. In this section, we describe each component of the intervention in turn.

# **4.3.1 Baseline Information**

We begin with a set of standard questions on the respondent’s socio-economic background, including employment status, highest level of education attained, marital status, and dependents. We do not ask about gender, age, or income as this information is available in the administrative records obtained from the partner bank. We also include one question about the expected economic conditions in the country over the next 12 months, for which the possible responses are “better off,” “about the same,” and “worse off.” The language in this question, and all other questions about expectations, closely follows the wording used in the most widely used surveys of consumer expectations, such as the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Survey of Consumer Expectations (see, for example, Bachmann, Berg, and Sims, 2015; Fuster et al., 2020).

# **4.3.2 Elicitation of Prior Beliefs**

Next, we elicit participants’ inflation and exchange rate expectations at two points in time: immediately before the treated individuals receives information from the experimenter ( _prior beliefs_ ) and after a randomly chosen subset of respondents is provided with an inflation or exchange rate forecast ( _posterior beliefs_ ). The wording in both rounds is closely modeled on that used in standard surveys of consumer expectations, and was adjusted to the context of our study through qualitative interviews and an online pilot.

We elicit beliefs about the future inflation rate and exchange rate. To avoid artificially making one belief more salient than the other, we randomized the order of these two questions. To elicit inflation expectations, the surveyors first provide a definition of inflation by explaining that “[...] inflation is the measure of how prices in Malaysia change in general” and then elicit the respondent’s expected inflation rate over the following 12 months. Our wording is similar to that used in one of the most widely used surveys of inflation expectations, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York _Survey of Consumer Expectations_ , which asks about the inflation rate directly.<sup>8</sup> Participants are asked to give their response in percentage points.

As documented in Section 3.1, the nominal exchange rate is already salient in news media and online searches in the country of study. This makes it more straightforward to elicit exchange

> 8. Another widely used source of data is the _Michigan Survey of Consumers_ , conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, which asks about _prices in general_ instead of asking about inflation directly. See Armantier et al. (2016) for a discussion on how these differences in wording might affect responses. Given the similarity of the questions used to elicit expectations, we can benchmark our results to those of related studies that have used the _Survey of Consumer Expectations_ data and, with some caveats that have been highlighted by Armantier et al. (2016) among others, to studies that used the _Michigan Consumer Survey_ data.

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