Young people’s preferences for financial versus non-financial attributes of pension funds

This thesis examines the preferences of young Dutch people for pension funds. The utility that young Dutch people derive from the attributes of pension funds help us to gain knowledge about their pension preference structures. To address this objective we carried out focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and a conjoint experiment to identify the importance that young people attach to the financial and non-financial attributes of a pension fund. Our resultsshow that certain attributes are significant drivers of young people’s utility of pension funds.On average, young people find financial attributes, such as coverage ratio and past investment returns, more important than the non-financial attribute: Socially Responsible Investing.Comparisons between demographic groups show that the factors age, gender and (financial) education have a significant influence on the pension fund preferences of Dutch (young) people. Also, we find that risk-aversion has a significant influence on the pension fundpreferences of Dutch (young) people, while overconfidence has not.