The default option in individual decision making has proved to be a major attractor in a large number of situations, but we still have little information on the reasons why decision makers so often stick to the default choice. We have devised a new module for the Dutch DNB Household Survey to learn about default behavior and to discriminate between potential explanations. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we identify potential explanations for default choices (including procrastination, inertia, illiteracy, obedience and regret aversion). Second, we provide empirical evidence on their relative importance in a large number of situations. Third, our survey data allow us to analyze the entire population distribution instead of selected groups (like workers, or students) and to control for a rich set of personal characteristics, as well as for labor market status, income, and wealth. Our findings confirm that the default choice plays a key role in individual decision making. Inaddition, we show that its relevance differs across domains: the default option attracts the majority of preferences in situations where the marginal disutility associated with postponing the decision is relatively low, or where the choice problem is increasingly complex. Moreover, we find that even though choice behavior is principally driven by different reasons across different situations overall procrastination and financial illiteracy provide the mostpowerful explanations for why people stick to the default.
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Paper provided by Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department in its series DNB Working Papers with number
165.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Ted O'Donoghue & Matthew Rabin, 1999.
"Doing It Now or Later,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 89(1), pages 103-124, March.
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