A Fistful of Dollars - Financial Incentives Improve Retirement Information Search

To understand what motivates individuals to become informed about their pension situation, we conducted two field experiments with 245,712 and 257,433 pension fund participants, respectively. We find that lottery-type financial incentives to visit an online personal pension planner are cost effective and increase the rate at which individuals check their pension information. This uptake of pension information led to improved pension knowledge and increased savings behavior three weeks after our intervention. Offering a few large prizes rather than many small prizes is most effective, and financial incentives work when used repeatedly.