'Retirement Experiments - Fatas, Lacomba and Lagos'
(AsPredicted #81754)

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1) Have any data been collected for this study already?
No, no data have been collected for this study yet.

2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study?
This study attempt to partially replicate a modified-design experiment from Fatas, Lacombas and Lagos (2007, Economic Enquiry) - "An Experimental Test on Retirement Decisions".

As in their paper, our main question is whether different actuarially fair pension systems are neutral with respect to individual timing of retirement.

3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Fraction of subjects in the treatment condition that choose each period at the timing to start collecting payoffs (i.e. their timing of "experimental retirement").

4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
Treatment conditions (with random assignment of subjects) are based the a life-contingent payoff structure: Annuity, Lump-Sum or Combination (of annuity and lump-sum). In all treatments, subjects choose when (periods from 1 to 15) they want to start collecting payoffs, under declining probabilities of reaching each subsequent period.

5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
We will use Mann-Whitney-U tests on the difference of payoff timing choice between treatment conditions. We will also run OLS models on the payoff timing choice using the 5 specifications used by the original authors, but replacing their risk-aversion and time discounting measures by our own post-main-task elicitation measures.

6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations.
We exclude subjects who navigate through instructions in less than 10 seconds. We exclude subjects who, after a trial round, fail two or more quiz questions on the mechanics of the experiment in a first attempt, or who fail any question in a second attempt. We exclude subjects who do not complete all remaining tasks within 60min of passing the quiz.

7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size?
No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined.
Bilendi (a market research company) will recruit subjects online (Germany subject pool) until we report back 612 valid responses, or until 12 days have passed after start of data collection, whichever comes first. Subjects already on the task completion pipeline at the time we shut the experiment down will be allowed to continue until they finish within the time limit.

8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
In our implementation, in each of the three rounds, after making the decision, we make subjects quickly navigate the periods in sequence, until a red ball is drawn (termination condition). Subjects start the experiment with 14 green and 1 red ball. After each period, a ball is drawn without replacement to determine continuation or termination.

We will also run additional within-subject analyses to explore whether the experienced termination period in the first rounds (1 to 2 out of 3) influences the subject timing decision in later rounds (2 or 3 out of 3).

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