Current Identifiable Biases in Italian Pension Fund Enrolment Decisions

Previous research has demonstrated that consumer decisions could be affected by some biases in the supplementary pension field. Decision making is very often not guided by rationality, and in many cases, if forced to choose, people will decide not to decide, passively accepting the decisions made by others. Such behavior deserves to be analyzed and studied in order to better understand its consequences, and determine whether the latter can be turned to the advantage of the decision-makers themselves. Using a database of 24 occupational pension funds representing 1.7 million employees, this paper examines the presence of default bias and extremeness aversion in Italian workers' choices regarding the supplementary pension system, as a result of the new rules enacted in 2007.The results provide insights which are important for public policy as regards the possibility of taking account of these biases when formulating the regulation, benefiting employees