EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Role of Information and Social Interactions in Retirement Plan Decisions: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

Esther Duflo and Emmanuel Saez

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2003, vol. 118, issue 3, 815-842

Abstract: This paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees' decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account (TDA) retirement plan within a large university. The experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benefits information fair organized by the university, by promising a monetary reward for attendance. The experiment multiplied by more than five the attendance rate of these treated individuals (relative to controls), and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated. TDA enrollment five and eleven months after the fair was significantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated. However, the effect on TDA enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did. We provide three interpretations—differential treatment effects, social network effects, and motivational reward effects—to account for these results.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (847)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/00335530360698432 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions: Evidence from a randomized experiment (2003) Downloads
Working Paper: The Role of Information and Social Interactions in Retirement Plan Decisions: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (2002) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:118:y:2003:i:3:p:815-842.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:118:y:2003:i:3:p:815-842.