Autonomy or Delegation, Libertarianism or Paternalism: what I like for myself and what I like for others on pension savings

This paper analyzes the relationship between financial literacy, perception of own preference or eccentricity, and the willingness or desire to delegate the planning for pensions to government regulation and the willingness or desire to have government regulation on savings plans for the population as a whole. By using an online survey conducted with Bilendi&Respondi, we correlate the variables of people’s perception of how different they are from others with respect to their pension plan preferences, how informed they are about financial matters in general, and what are their preferences toward the government intervention of savings plans. The empirical approach is inspired by theory results of Konrad (2023). His game-theory analysis suggest that two factors increase the citizen’s desire for autonomous economic decision-making: eccentricity of own preferences, and own expertise/knowledge and decisions skills. Our work corroborates these two hypotheses in the specific context of pension savings decisions. Furthermore, we also analyze what are the factors that determine the difference between wanting to be regulated themselves and wanting others to be regulated. We find that people that want less intervention for themselves and are more informed want, on average, more government intervention for others.