Failures of Contingent Reasoning in Annuitization Decisions

We thank Jeffrey Brown, Olivia Mitchell, and Stephen Zeldes, and participants at seminars and conferences for helpful comments. We are grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for funding (Grant#: G-2018-11101). We thank the AmeriSpeak team, and in particular Dan Constanzo and LeeAnn McCabe for help with implementing the experiment. We are grateful to Carl Harris, Isabel Galea, Chenxi Jiang, Yikun (Allison) Jiang, Amina Ospan, Umair Shahbaz, Afras Sial, and Laila Voss for excellent research assistance. Our experiment was determined exempt by the Berkeley IRB (#2019-12-12779) and by the Dartmouth IRB (#STUDY00031949). The analysis plan was pre-registered on the AEA RCT registry, RCT ID AEARCTR-0006903. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix
• randomized controlled trials registry entry
• Instructions to the experiment