Brigitte Madrian
Behavioural economist. First author of the 2001 study that established the default effect on the administrative records of a real workforce rather than in a laboratory.
Who they are
Madrian works on retirement saving and on how the design of a benefits plan changes what employees end up with. Her best known work uses payroll and enrolment records from firms that changed their arrangements, which makes it unusually resistant to the criticisms that have troubled the rest of the behavioural literature.
She is the name missing whenever defaults are credited to the books that popularised them.
Key papers
Madrian, B. C., & Shea, D. F. (2001). The power of suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) participation and savings behavior. Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Carroll, G. D., Choi, J. J., Laibson, D., Madrian, B. C., & Metrick, A. (2009). Optimal defaults and active decisions. Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Key ideas
The 2001 paper offers two mechanisms, not one. Inertia is the famous half. The other is that employees appeared to read the default as investment advice.
The 2009 paper tests the third regime. Requiring an explicit choice, with no default at all, raised initial enrolment by twenty-eight percentage points against standard opt-in.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1162/003355301753265543
- doi:10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1639