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，这导致他们未充分利用年金并在最佳时间之前申请社会保障福利。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了关于不同年金化和索赔决定的后果的小插曲。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来评估我们的小插曲。在我们的实验中，受访者要么被分配到没有小插曲的对照组，要么被分配到书面小插曲或视频小插曲。然后，他们被要求就年金化或社会保障索赔向假设的人提供建议，并被问及有关这些概念的事实问题。我们发现有证据表明，接触小插曲会导致受访者提供更好的建议。例如，在小插曲治疗中，相对健康的人与相对生病的人的建议索赔年龄之间的差距比对照组大了近一年。此外，这些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，沟通方式并没有产生重大影响——视频和书面小插曲同样有效。