Evidence shows that people have difficulty understanding complex aspects of retirement planning, which leads them to under-utilize annuities and claim Social Security benefits earlier than is optimal. To target this problem, we developed vignettes about the consequences of different annuitization and claiming decisions. We evaluated our vignettes using an experiment with a representative online panel of nearly 2,000 Americans. In our experiment, respondents were either assigned to a control group with no vignette, to a written vignette, or to a video vignette. They were then asked to give advice to hypothetical persons on annuitization or Social Security claiming, and were asked factual questions about these concepts. We found evidence that being exposed to vignettes led respondents to give better advice. For example, the gap between advised claim age for a relatively healthy person versus a relatively sick person was larger by nearly a year in the vignette treatments than in the control group. Furthermore, the vignettes increased financial literacy related to these concepts by 10–15 percentage points. Interestingly, the mode of communication did not have a significant impact – the video and written vignettes were equally effective.

有证据表明，人们难以理解退休计划的复杂方面，这导致他们对年金的利用不足，并且比最佳退休金提早获得社会保障福利。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了关于不同年金和要求决策的后果的小插曲。我们使用由近2,000名美国人组成的具有代表性的在线小组进行的实验，对小插曲进行了评估。在我们的实验中，受访者被分配到没有小插图的对照组，书面小插图或视频小插图。然后，他们被要求就年金或社会保障要求向假想的人提供建议，并被问及有关这些概念的事实问题。我们发现有证据表明，接触暗角导致受访者提供了更好的建议。例如，在小插图治疗中，相对健康的人与相对疾病的人的建议理赔年龄之间的差距比对照组大了近一年。此外，小插曲将与这些概念相关的金融知识提高了10-15个百分点。有趣的是，沟通方式并未产生重大影响-视频和书面短片同等有效。