"Tax-Free": The Effect of a Heuristic Cue on the Choice Between a TFSA and an RRSP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors investigate whether and, if so, the extent to which a heuristic cue, the term "tax-free," contained in the name of one of the two primary tax-sheltered savings plans in Canada—the tax-free savings account (TFSA)—biases individuals' saving preferences relative to the registered retirement savings plan. On the basis of the heuristic-systematic model of information processing, the authors predict that the term "tax-free" is a favourable heuristic cue that will suppress systematic processing and bias individuals toward selecting a savings plan with this term in its name. They conduct three experiments to test this proposition. Overall, the results suggest that individuals have a clear preference for a tax-sheltered savings plan with "tax-free" in its name—regardless of the content of accompanying explanatory information. The preference for savings plans with "tax-free" in the name may suggest the need for more education and financial advice to reduce the use of heuristics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".