Effects of awareness to security features on the confidence in banknotes

Abstract

The value of a banknote is dependent on people’s subjective trust in the banknote, and the resistance against counterfeiting is a key factor of people’s confidence in the banknote. An experiment was conducted to investigate the relationships between the awareness to security features on banknotes and the perceived resistance against counterfeiting in those banknotes. It was found that the more security features subjects found by themselves on a banknote, the more resistant they perceived the banknote, which suggests that people’s awareness to security features affects their confidence in the banknote. The perceived resistance was irrelevant to the number of public security features disclosed by the central banks, but was relevant to the familiarity to the note, which suggests the importance of practical experience with banknotes rather than the knowledge about them only. These findings can give a quantitative ground to the evaluation of the design of security features on banknotes.