Save More Tomorrow™: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Saving
提出一个名为“明天多存点”的储蓄计划，员工预先承诺将未来加薪的一部分用于退休储蓄。首次实施结果显示，78%的人加入，80%的人坚持到第四次加薪，平均储蓄率从3.5%升至13.6%。
As firms switch from defined‐benefit plans to defined‐contribution plans, employees bear more responsibility for making decisions about how much to save. The employees who fail to join the plan or who participate at a very low level appear to be saving at less than the predicted life cycle savings rates. Behavioral explanations for this behavior stress bounded rationality and self‐control and suggest that at least some of the low‐saving households are making a mistake and would welcome aid in making decisions about their saving. In this paper, we propose such a prescriptive savings program, called Save More Tomorrow™ (hereafter, the SMarT program). The essence of the program is straightforward: people commit in advance to allocating a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings. We report evidence on the first three implementations of the SMarT program. Our key findings, from the first implementation, which has been in place for four annual raises, are as follows: (1) a high proportion (78 percent) of those offered the plan joined, (2) the vast majority of those enrolled in the SMarT plan (80 percent) remained in it through the fourth pay raise, and (3) the average saving rates for SMarT program participants increased from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent over the course of 40 months. The results suggest that behavioral economics can be used to design effective prescriptive programs for important economic decisions.