TY  - JOUR
AU  - Duflo,Esther
AU  - Saez,Emmanuel
TI  - The Role of Information and Social Interactions in Retirement Plan Decisions: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8885
PY  - 2002
Y2  - April 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8885
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8885.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Esther Duflo
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-252G
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-7013
Fax: 617/253-6915
E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu

Emmanuel Saez
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-4631
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: saez@econ.berkeley.edu
AB  - 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 more than tripled the attendance rate of these treated individuals (relative to controls), and doubled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated. TDA enrollment 5 and 11 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.
ER  -