STORRE

First paragraph: For decades, the UK pensions industry could have been described as sleepy: a lack of vim and vigour borne of long time-scales and limited innovation. Come April 2015, everything changed. The UK government scrapped the system that all but forced retirees without final salary schemes to buy an annuity with the money they had saved in their pension plans. Instead, those reaching the age of 55 were suddenly gifted “pensions freedom” to invest, cash-in or annuitise their savings.

State-run pensions advice websites in the UK and the US recommend considering how long the pension needs to last and offer a life expectancy calculator for this purpose. Theories make conflicting predictions regarding the effect on annuities preference of following this recommendation. We asked a quota sample of over 2,000 UK residents to choose between an annuity or cashing out their pension. Immediately prior to choice, a random subset of participants were asked how long their retirement wi...

Algorithms are increasingly being adopted in healthcare settings, promising increased safety, productivity and efficiency. The growing sociological literature on algorithms in healthcare shares an assumption that algorithms are introduced to ‘support’ decisions within an interactive order that is predominantly human-oriented. We present a different argument, calling attention to the manner in which organisations can end up introducing a nonnegotiable disjuncture between human initiated care w...

Learning curves are frequently cited to justify the subsidization of new technologies to facilitate market competitiveness. The main literature has focused on improving the specification of the basic learning curve model by augmenting it to control for technological development measured by public R&D expenditures. In addition to employing R&D expenditures, the purpose of this paper is to assess the robustness of an augmented multi-factor learning curve model by estimating learning rates in a ...