Title: What you don't know can't help you
Description: "This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives.  We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives.  We find that well-informed individuals are five times more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual when knowledge is ignored.  We further find that the ill-informed individuals do respond to their own misperception of the incentives, rather than being unresponsive to any incentives"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Subjects: Decision making, Pensions, Retirement