Description: A primer for pension actuaries and others to learn what financial economics says about how pension plans are designed, invested, accounted for and funded. This guide focused on private single employer plans with widely held stock.

Description: A mathematical framework for benefits and choices must be created to model benefit selection. This paper creates such a framework by defining benefit plans as reimbursement functions. These are then used with a defined choice function to calculate the cost deviation due to selection. Finally, utility functions can be applied to this framework to predict choice.