Short planning horizons and the Save More Tomorrow program

IF 1.5 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics Pub Date : 2026-03-01 Epub Date: 2025-06-29 DOI:10.1016/j.socec.2025.102388

Erin Cottle Hunt , T. Scott Findley

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Abstract

Motivated by evidence that households face significant behavioral/cognitive challenges with planning very far into the future regarding retirement preparation, we construct a life-cycle model of consumption and saving in which a representative individual is shortsighted due to having a short planning horizon. A novel feature of our model is that the individual participates in a Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) retirement saving program à la Thaler and Benartzi (2004). Our quantitative-theoretic findings indicate that participation in a SMarT program increases the well-being of a shortsighted individual for a large set of the parameter space examined. And, of notable importance, these welfare gains occur in the absence of any credit market frictions or imperfections. We also find that the welfare benefits from participation in the SMarT program are smaller in magnitude if a shortsighted individual decumulates their assets at their discretion during retirement, compared to the case in which the SMarT asset account balance is annuitized at retirement.

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短期规划和“明天节约更多”计划

有证据表明，家庭在为退休做准备时面临着重大的行为/认知挑战，我们构建了一个消费和储蓄的生命周期模型，其中有代表性的个人由于计划范围短而目光短浅。我们模型的一个新颖特征是，个人参与了“明天多储蓄”（SMarT）退休储蓄计划（la Thaler and Benartzi, 2004）。我们的定量理论研究结果表明，参与SMarT计划增加了近视个体在检查的大量参数空间中的福祉。而且，值得注意的是，这些福利收益是在没有任何信贷市场摩擦或缺陷的情况下产生的。我们还发现，与在退休时将SMarT资产账户余额年金化的情况相比，如果近视的个人在退休期间自行累积资产，那么参与SMarT计划所带来的福利收益的幅度会更小。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

113

审稿时长

83 days

期刊介绍： The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.