摘要：The default option in individual decision making has proved to be a major attractor in a largenumber of situations, but we still have little information on the reasons why decision makersso often stick to the default choice. We have devised a new module for the Dutch DNBHousehold Survey to learn about default behavior and to discriminate between potentialexplanations. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we identify potentialexplanations for default choices (including procrastination, inertia, illiteracy, obedience andregret aversion). Second, we provide empirical evidence on their relative importance in alarge number of situations. Third, our survey data allow us to analyze the entire populationdistribution instead of selected groups (like workers, or students) and to control for a rich setof personal characteristics, as well as for labor market status, income, and wealth. Ourfindings 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 themajority of preferences in situations where the marginal disutility associated with postponingthe 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 reasonsacross different situations overall procrastination and financial illiteracy provide the mostpowerful explanations for why people stick to the default.
