Individuals frequently make insurance choices that appear sub-optimal, possibly reflecting difficulty mapping insurance contracts to their distribution of financial consequences. We develop and experimentally test a decision aid that provides this mapping in two experiments mirroring typical health insurance decisions. Compared to standard feature-based information, our distributionbased tool substantially reduces dominance violations and changes choice patterns across a range of menus. Under feature-based displays, choices can be most easily rationalized by models of heuristic choices, such as minimizing premium or deductible. With the decision aid, significantly more people have choice patterns that are better explained by expected utility theory.

This paper examines two behavioral factors that diminish people's ability to value a lifetime income stream or annuity, drawing on a randomized experiment with about 4,000 adults in a U.S. nationally representative sample. We find that increasing the complexity of the annuity choice reduces respondents' ability to value the annuity, measured by the difference between the sell and buy values they assign to the annuity. When we limit narrow choice bracketing by inducing people to think first about how quickly or slowly to spend down assets in retirement, their ability to value an annuity increases.