Plan Design and 401(k) Savings Outcomes

Do 401k Plan Advisors Take Their Own Advice?

Sponsors of defined contribution plans often hire financial advisors to help them to design and monitor these plans. I compare the designs of plans that advisors help create and monitor (client plans) to the designs of plans that the advisors use themselves (advisor plans). I find that advisors have an impact on the investment menus of their clients. Compared to an average pair of plans, a pair...

Pension Plan Characteristics and Framing Effects in Employee Savings Behavior

Pension Plan Characteristics and Framing Effects in Employee Savings Behavior In this paper we document the importance of framing effects in the retirement savings decisions of college professors. Pensions in many post-secondary institutions are funded by a combination of an employer contribution and a mandatory employee contribution. Employees can also make tax-deferred contributions to a supp...

The Adequacy of Investment Choices Offered By 401K Plans

Defined-contribution plans represent a major organizational form for investors’ retirement savings. Today more than one third of all workers are enrolled in 401K plans. In a 401K plan, participants select assets from a set of choices designated by an employer. For over half of 401K-plan participants, retirement savings represent their sole financial asset. Yet to date there has been no study of...

Shared savings don't jeopardize patient outcomes.

Plan Generation, Plan Management, and the Design of Computational Agents

A significant amount of prior research effort in the field of Artificial Intelligence has gone into the design and analysis of planning algorithms. For the most part, this work has been guided by several strong, simplifying assumptions, most notably, that the plans will be performed in static, deterministic environments. Although these assumptions have made rigorous formal analysis possible, th...