Large variations in retirement wealth are common, with some households accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars and others accumulating next to nothing. We examine to what extent formal planning or simple rules of thumb contribute to these differences in wealth accumulation. In particular,...

In this paper we propose a new strategy for comparing the behavior of a hyperbolic discounter who possesses self-control problems to an exponential discounter who does not. Our strategy controls for inherent differences in overall levels of impatience across discount functions, which thereby...

To accurately predict behavior economists need reliable measures of individual time preferences and attitudes toward risk and typically need to assume stability of these characteristics over time and across decision domains. We test the reliability of two choice tasks for eliciting discount...

In this paper we experimentally investigate whether partial coercion can in combination with conditional cooperation increase contributions to a public good. We are especially interested in the behavior of the non-coerced populations. The main finding is that in our setting conditional...

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A...

Based on large-scale survey data from the 2006-2012 waves of the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we show that individual portfolio decisions are influenced by a variety of traits and facets traditionally investigated in the field of personality psychology. Two personality traits that taken...

This study examines the sensitivity of the retirement age decision to standard retirement ages in pension overviews (age anchors) with a self‐constructed survey. Individuals retire later when they are confronted with a higher age anchor. Specifically, their retirement age corresponds to the...

Allowing for the possibility that individuals may not always act in their best interest, what is the connection between choice and welfare? This paper addresses this concern by studying the normative implications of a general model of individual decision-making that allows for suboptimal...

This paper reports an experiment that examines the effects of price complexity on market prices. In my experimental posted-offer markets, each seller offers an identical good to buyers with homogeneous preferences. First, sellers simultaneously decide on the price and the tariff structure of...