Measuring Preferences Needed to Guide Saving and Investing for Retirement

描述（由申请人提供）：美国老年人面临着复杂的财务和健康决策的困境，同时随着年龄的增长，认知能力下降的发生率很高。应对认知限制对经济决策影响的重要政策建议之一是建立一些制度，比如“自动401(k)”，让人们默认做出“好的”选择。这种方法的困难在于，知道一个人的“好选择”是什么，关键取决于知道她的偏好。特别是，对于退休储蓄和投资选择，了解三个偏好参数的值是至关重要的：风险规避、时间偏好和跨期替代弹性（EIS）。即使政策忽略个体差异并创建一个默认版本，对于群体中每个人来说，一个“好的”选择仍然取决于至少知道该群体中的偏好分布。这个项目将扩展我们对这些偏好的理解，并进一步确定这些偏好的表达是如何受到认知能力的影响的。具体目标是：(1)在高水平的分析细节上理解风险厌恶度量的不一致性，并开始对时间偏好和跨期替代的弹性进行分析；(2)衡量认知限制（相对于非标准偏好）在多大程度上导致了不同风险偏好、时间偏好和跨期替代弹性的不一致；(3)开发方法来克服认知限制在测量这些偏好时产生的困难，特别是通过引出“合理的偏好”而不是使用“未经指导的偏好”，并在大量处于退休储蓄黄金时期的成年人样本中实施这些方法。更普遍的目标是开发识别“合理偏好”的技术，以识别更大范围的偏好，这些偏好对美国老年人面临的艰难决定至关重要，甚至超出了退休储蓄的决定。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older Americans face the dilemma of complex financial and health decisions combined with a high incidence of cognitive decline with age. One of the important policy proposals for dealing with the effects of cognitive limitations on economic decision- making is to set up institutions, such as "automatic 401(k)'s," which default people in to "good" choices. The difficulty with this approach is that knowing what a "good choice" is for an individual depends crucially on knowing her preferences. In particular, for retirement saving and investment choices, it is crucial to know the values of three preference parameters: risk aversion, time preference and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS). Even if policy ignores individual differences and creates one version of the default, a "good" choice for everyone in the group still depends on at least knowing the distribution of preferences in that group. This project will extend our understanding and further our identification of these preferences and how the expression of these preferences is affected by cognitive abilities. The specific aims are to: (1) Understand at a high level of analytic detail inconsistencies in measures of risk aversion and begin to do so for time preferences and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution; (2) Gauge the extent to which cognitive limitations (as opposed to non-standard preferences) are responsible for inconsistencies in different measures of risk preferences, and also time preferences and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution; and (3) Develop methods to overcome the difficulties cognitive limitations create in measuring these preferences-in particular by eliciting "reasoned preferences" rather than using "untutored preferences," and implement these methods on a large sample of adults in the prime years for retirement saving. The more general aim is to develop techniques for identifying "reasoned preferences" for the even larger set of preferences that matter for difficult decisions that older Americans face, even beyond the retirement saving decision. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The appropriate financial or health decision for an individual often depends in part on the individual's preferences, such as willingness to take risks. This project will study how cognitive abilities interact with measures of preferences that are relevant for financial and health decision-making, and will develop improved measures of these preferences that can be used to help people make the decisions that are best for them.