Beliefs About Current and Future Fertility: The Role of IVF in Women’s Expectations and Decisions

We will conduct an online survey experiment with UK-resident women aged 20–30 recruited through Prolific. Participants will first report their expectations about current fertility, later-life fertility without medical assistance, and later-life fertility with IVF, as well as their expectations about future earnings under different timings of motherhood. Two randomly selected subsamples will then be provided with correct information about IVF cost or success rate. Participants will subsequently complete a series of hypothetical career choice tasks in which they compare career paths that vary in future income commensurate with how demanding the career is, affecting whether earlier childbearing is more or less feasible. This design will allow us to examine how beliefs about fertility, IVF, and the career consequences of motherhood timing shape women’s choices.

2026-05-02

2026-05-06

The primary outcome variable will be the switching point in participants’ choices between hypothetical career paths, measured in percentage of expected future income. In each set of choices, career paths will differ in future income proportional to how demanding the career is, affecting whether earlier childbearing is more or less feasible. We will use the income level at which participants switch between options to measure their willingness to pay, in terms of percentage of expected future income, for preserving the option of earlier childbearing.

Fertility expectations, IVF-related expectations, expected earnings by motherhood timing, and belief updating following the information treatment

We will conduct an online survey experiment with UK-resident women aged 20–30 recruited through Prolific. All participants will be compensated equally for completing the study, according to the standard market rate of the platform, regardless of their responses. Participants will first report their expectations about current fertility, later-life fertility without medical assistance, later-life fertility with IVF, and future earnings under different timings of motherhood. Two randomly selected subsamples will then receive correct information about IVF cost and success rate separately. Participants will subsequently complete a series of hypothetical career choice tasks in which they compare career paths that differ in future income proportional to how demanding the career is, affecting whether earlier childbearing is more or less feasible. We will use participants’ choices across these tasks to measure what share of future income they are willing to trade off to preserve the option of having children earlier in life. We will also collect demographic characteristics and other background information from participants.

Not available

Randomisation is done by the Qualtrics software.

At the individual level.

No

N/A

708 individuals from prolific

236 individuals in each treatment arm (control, success rate information treatment, and cost information treatment)

Power calculations are based on the primary outcome, the switch point in the career-choice task. Using pilot data, we assume a standard deviation of 29 for the switch point. We calculate the required sample size using a two-sided test with α=0.05, 80% power, and equal assignment across the three experimental groups. The study is powered to detect an effect of 4 percentage points of future expected income. This requires approximately 642 analyzable participants in total. Because some participants may fail attention checks and be excluded from the main analysis, we inflate the target sample by 10%. This implies a recruitment target of approximately 708 participants, or about 236 participants per arm across the three experimental groups.