A Laboratory Study of Nudge with Retirement Savings

Dina Tasneem, Marine de Montaignac, Jim Engle-Warnick and Audrey Azerot

CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO

Abstract: We report results from an on-line economics experiment that examines the effect of nudging retirement savings decisions. In the experiments, participants make decisions in a finitely repeated retirement savings game, in which income during working years is uncertain, and retire-ment age is known. Participants, who are household financial decision-makers, are nudged with automatic savings in each period of the game. We find that that the nudge simply replaced nat-ural decision-making observed in the absence of a nudge in this experiment, even to the extent that it resulted in nearly identical inferred decision rules. This surprising result highlights the unpredictability of the effect of nudging human behavior.

Keywords: Precautionary Savings; Retirement Savings; Life-cycle Models; Dynamic Optimization; Decision Heuristics; Nudge; Choice Architecture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 C91 E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-mac and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cir:cirwor:2018s-23

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