In a typical 401k plan, when you first become eligible you get a big pile of forms and you're told, fill out these forms if you want to join. Tell us how much amount you've saved and how you want to invest the money. In, under automatic enrollment you get that same pile of forms but the top page says, if you don't fill out these forms, we're going to enroll you anyway and we're going to enroll you at this saving rate and in these investments.

My mantra is if you want to help people accomplish some goal, make it easy.

Rip Van Winkle would be the ideal stock market investor: Rip could invest in the market before his nap and when he woke up 20 years later, he'd be happy. He would have been asleep through all the ups and downs in between. But few investors resemble Mr. Van Winkle. The more often an investor counts his money - or looks at the value of his mutual funds in the newspaper - the lower his risk tolerance.

People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.

I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.

A good rule of thumb is to assume that everything matters.

Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.