The Retirement Belief Model: Understanding the Search for Pension Information
By Wiebke Eberhardt (Maastricht University), Elisabeth Brüggen (Maastricht University), Thomas Post (Maastricht University) & Chantal Hoet (Aegon)
Many individuals avoid information relevant for retirement planning. This behavior is worrying as pension systems shift risks and responsibilities to individuals. Individuals who avoid pension information fail to discover whether they save too little for retirement, negatively affecting their long-run financial well-being. We generate knowledge about the factors that stimulate or hinder the search for pension information. Using an interdisciplinary lens, we develop a unifying model – the Retirement Belief Model (RBM) – and empirically validate it with field data from the Netherlands and United Kingdom. We find that the RBM core beliefs (susceptibility, severity, benefits, barriers, and self-efficacy) as well as trust and emotions significantly explain search for pension information. Our findings help both pension providers and policy makers in improving pension communication by stressing, for example, the benefits of information acquisition, by establishing trust and designing segment specific approaches.
Source: SSRN
