Shlomo Benartzi

About

Shlomo Benartzi is a behavioral economist interested in combining the insights of psychology and economics to solve big societal problems. His goal is to help people make better decisions on a very large scale. He is a professor and co-founder of the Behavioral Decision Making Group at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Benartzi’s current focus is on online behavior, studying how people think differently on screens. His research encompasses behavioral economics, savings, investing, retirement planning, personal finance, nudges, and behavioral decision making. He has contributed to understanding how behavioral nudges can improve financial decision-making, such as increasing retirement savings, encouraging pre-commitment, and designing effective financial advice. His work also explores issues like the lack of urgency in financial decisions, the impact of social and psychological factors on investing and saving behaviors, and how to implement cost-effective nudges to promote better financial outcomes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Economics
• Finance
• Marketing
• Social psychology
• Advertising
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?

  Psychological Science · 2017-06-05 · 788 citations

  reviewOpen access1st author

  Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of "nudge" interventions that governments are now adopting alter people's decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare fav…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 98 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using fresh starts to nudge increased retirement savings

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2021 · 62 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Temporal Reframing and Participation in a Savings Program: A Field Experiment

  Marketing Science · 2020 · 48 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  This study explores whether framing savings in more or less granular formats can increase sign-ups for a recurring deposit program in a FinTech environment.

  PublisherDOI

• Choice Architecture and Retirement Saving Plans

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-30 · 16 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we apply basic principles from the domain of design and architecture to choices made by employees saving for retirement. Three of the basic principles of design we apply are: (1) there is no neutral design, (2) design does matter, and (3) many of the seemingly minor design elements could matter as well. Applying these principles to the domain of retirement savings, we show that the design of retirement saving vehicles has a large effect on saving rates and investment elections, an…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard H. Thaler

  61 shared

• John Beshears

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  16 shared

• William Charles Weld

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  13 shared

• Hal E. Hershfield

  University of California, Los Angeles

  13 shared

• Roni Michaely

  11 shared

• Katherine L. Milkman

  California University of Pennsylvania

  10 shared

• Eli Amir

  Tel Aviv University

  9 shared

• Hengchen Dai

  Anderson University - South Carolina

  7 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Daniel J. Benjaminh-60
• Andrew G. Atkesonh-52
• Sushil Bikhchandanih-41