Behavioral regularities in old age planning.

Summary Planning for old age needs involves ‘high stakes’ decisions such as the choice of a retirement plan, generic saving and investment decisions alongside the take up of insurance for long-term care . We argue that these individual decisions are formed upon limited information and, result from beliefs about future needs that are often not well understood. This paper provides an overview of a number of behavioral ‘regularities’ that illustrate areas where traditional economic approaches should include behavioral economic explanations to better understand and describe decisions for old age. These include the role of framing and reference points, the effects of misperception and behavioral learning, as well as the role of several biases such as optimism, present bias and overconfidence. We contend that choice architectures that incorporate such regularities can help making old age decisions.