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
• World Wide Web
• Public relations
• Internet privacy
• Mathematics
• Gerontology
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Comparing Foot-in-the-Door and Door-in-the-Face Messaging Strategies to Increase Savings

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-05-20

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This project investigates how persuasive messaging strategies influence individuals’ savings behaviors. Specifically, we compare two well-established persuasion techniques: the Foot-in-the-Door (FITD) approach, where a smaller initial request precedes a larger target request, and the Door-in-the-Face (DITF) approach, where a larger initial request precedes a smaller target request. Our purpose is to examine which strategy more effectively increases a financial technology mobile app’s users’ likelihood of enrolling in a recurring savings program and which maximizes their total savings contributions both immediately after receiving the savings messages as well as two months post-intervention. Participants in this large-scale in-app field experiment will be randomly assigned to receive a savings request messages that varies in structure (FITD, DITF, or repeated target requests) and the magnitude of the requested savings contribution (low vs. high dollar amounts). The primary outcome of interest is whether users sign up for automatic recurring savings deposits to the financial app after exposure to a given savings request message. Additional outcomes include the size of the recurring savings commitment, net contributions after 60 days, and compliance (i.e., whether users sign up for automatic recurring savings) at the target request amount or higher.

  Publisher

• The Value of Holistic Financial Advice

  Financial Planning Review · 2025-01-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Financial advice has historically been narrowly focused on investing decisions, which has led to skepticism from researchers and policymakers about its value, both in terms of the net alpha and personalization level of advised portfolios. This article explores the potential value of broader, or holistic, financial advice that also covers savings, debt and insurance decisions, which are relevant to a much broader population, not just those with enough wealth to care about investment alpha. The results show that there's tremendous value in holistic financial advice, which is worth $4384 per year or 7.5% of annual income for the typical household and translates into 2472 bps of the median 401(k) account balance. More importantly, this type of advice can be especially valuable for those with lower income who historically have been underserved. While policymakers have traditionally focused on the costs of financial advice, this research suggests that they should also be concerned about ensuring low and middle‐class households have access to valuable holistic guidance, which is becoming increasingly affordable by leveraging AI and other technologies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can reminder emails compel Americans to save? A two-million-person megastudy

  PNAS Nexus · 2025-08-30 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  In the United States, 24% of adults have no savings and 39% have less than a month of income saved. We present results from a megastudy where nearly 2 million customers of a US bank were randomly assigned to receive one of seven different 2-month email campaigns, each employing a different behavioral science insight to nudge one-time and recurring savings deposits and increase savings balances or to a control condition without such messages. These campaigns increased the probability of making a one-time savings deposit, on average, by 0.05 percentage points (a 0.51% increase over control). The best-performing campaign delivered weekly messages to customers that differed depending on recent savings behavior: messages to customers who had not made a savings account deposit in the last week included a simple reminder to save, while those to customers who had made a savings account deposit in the prior week were congratulated on this accomplishment. This top-performing campaign increased the monthly likelihood that a customer made a one-time savings deposit by 0.13 percentage points (a 1.32% increase). We estimate that rolling this 2-month campaign out to everyone in our megastudy population would have led to an extra $6,123,996 to $9,910,090 in savings. Together, our findings highlight that light-touch, frequent email nudges can cost-effectively create small increases in savings deposits in the United States. Ideally, to generate meaningful benefits, behavioral science insights would be incorporated into a wider range of communications and incentives designed by financial institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2023-01-13 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  To encourage farsighted behaviors, previous research suggests that marketers should invite consumers to precommit to adopting these behaviors “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of precommitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when precommitment is (and is not) effective at increasing adoption of farsighted behaviors. Specifically, the authors theorize that simultaneously offering consumers the opportunity to adopt a farsighted behavior now or later (i.e., offering “simultaneous precommitment”) may signal that the behavior is not urgently recommended; however, offering consumers the opportunity to adopt that behavior immediately and then, only if they decline, inviting them to adopt it later (i.e., offering “sequential precommitment”) may signal just the opposite. In a multisite field experiment (N = 5,196), the authors find that simultaneously giving consumers the chance to increase their savings now or later reduced retirement savings. Two preregistered lab studies (N = 5,080) show that simultaneous precommitment leads people to infer that taking action is not urgently recommended, and such inferences predict less adoption of recommended behaviors. Importantly, offering sequential precommitment increases inferred urgency, predicting greater adoption. Together, this research advances knowledge about the limits and potential of precommitment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to choose a default

  Behavioral Science & Policy · 2022-04-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  We have developed a model for setting a default when a population is choosing among ordered choices—that is, ones listed in ascending or descending order. A company, for instance, might want to set a default contribution rate that will increase employees’ average contributions to a retirement savings plan. A key input of the model is the distribution of latent options—the percentages of a population that select each available choice in the absence of a preset default. The model treats the default as an attraction point that causes some people to shift from their latent preference toward the default. It specifies the strength of each possible default's pull on each latent option and thereby points policymakers to the default most likely to achieve a desired aim. We tested our model using data from field experiments relating to retirement savings. In addition to presenting the results, which support the model's validity, we discuss how the model relates to prior empirical evidence on defaults.

  PublisherDOI

• Reducing Savings Gaps Through Pennies Versus Percent Framing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Using Fresh Starts to Nudge Increased Retirement Savings

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2021-08-06

  articleSenior author

  We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N = 6, 082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan immediately or at a specified future time point. Framing the future time point in relation to a fresh start date (e.g., the recipient’s birthday, the first day of spring) increased the likelihood that the mailing recipient chose to increase contributions at that future time point without decreasing their likelihood of increasing contributions immediately. Overall, fresh start framing increased retirement plan contributions in the eight months following the mailing. Our findings represent the first experimental demonstration of the benefits of fresh start framing in a consequential field setting.

  Publisher

• Using fresh starts to nudge increased retirement savings

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2021 · 62 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Gerontology
  • Social psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pennies Reframing of Savings Rates

  ACR North American Advances · 2020-01-01

  article
  Publisher

• Emergency Fund Experiment

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2020-11-18

  dataset
  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