As firms switch from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans, employees bear more responsibility for making decisions about how much to save. The employees who fail to join the plan or who participate at a very low level appear to be saving at less than the predicted life cycle savings rates. Behavioral explanations for this be-havior stress bounded rationality and self-control and suggest that at least some of the low-saving households are making a mistake and would welcome aid in making decisions about their saving. In this paper, we propose such a prescriptive savings program, called Save More Tomorrow (hereafter, the SMarT program). The essence of the program is straightforward: people commit in advance to allocat-ing a portion of their future salary increases toward retirement savings. We report evidence on the first three implementations of the SMarT program. Our key findings, from the first implementation, which has We are grateful to Brian Tarbox for implementing the Save More Tomorrow plan and for sharing the data with us. We would also like to thank many people at the following

Recent equity carve-outs in U.S. technology stocks appear to violate a basic premise of financial theory: identical assets have identical prices. In our 19982000 sample, holders of a share of company A are expected to receive x shares of company B, but the price of A is less than x times the price of B. A prominent example involves 3Com and Palm. Arbitrage does not eliminate this blatant mispricing due to short-sale constraints, so that B is overpriced but expensive or impossible to sell short. Evidence from options prices shows that shorting costs are extremely high, eliminating exploitable arbitrage opportunities.

Contrary to theoretical expectations, measures of willingness-to-accept greatly exceed measures of willingness-to-pay. This paper reports several experiments that demonstrate that this "endowment effect" persists even in market settings with opportunities to learn. Consumption objects (e.g., coffee mugs) are randomly given to half the subjects in an experiment. Markets for the mugs are then conducted. The Coase theorem predicts that about half the mugs will trade, but observed volume is always significantly less. When markets for "induced-value" tokens are conducted, the predicted volume is observed, suggesting that transactions costs cannot explain the undertrading for consumption goods.

The concept of self-control is incorporated in a theory of individual intertemporal choice by modeling the individual as an organization. The individual at a point in time is assumed to be both a farsighted planner and a myopic doer. The resulting conflict is seen to be fundamentally similar to the agency conflict between the owners and managers of a firm. Both individuals and firms use the same techniques to mitigate the problems which the conflicts create. This paper stresses the implications of this agency model and discusses as applications the effect of pensions on saving, saving and the timing of income flows, and individual discount rates.