Shlomo Benartzi is a member of the board at Acorns, a robo-saving app that encourages people to start saving and investing. Benartzi is developing new digital nudges that make it easy for the customers of Acorns to save money effortlessly. Along with Hal Hershfield and Steve Shu, Benartzi has tried to address is the tendency of people to not enroll in the automatic deposit program, in which a given amount of money is deposited every month into a savings account.  Such automated deposits are by far the most effective way to build up a nest egg: if people have to actively think about saving, then they probably won’t.

In the paper, "Temporal Reframing and Saving," the researchers experimented with several different versions of the same question.  On the enrollment screen, users were randomly assigned to one of three categories.  Some were asked if they would like to a save $5 every day, some were asked if they wanted to save $35 a week, and some were asked if they wanted to save $150 a month.  While only 7 percent opted to save $150 a month, nearly 30 percent decided to save $5 a day. Furthermore, this new framing essentially eliminated any difference in participation rates among lower and higher income customers. While three times as many higher income customers enrolled when offered the $150 a month frame, there was no difference in participation in the $5 a day condition.ex