There is discussion in both Canada and the United States of proposals which require private pension plans to provide indexed pension benefits. This paper employs both an auction and an implicit contract model to identify the compensating wage differentials required of possible policy initiatives. The contract model, motivated by the prevalence (especially in Canada) of ad hoc cost‐of‐living adjustments to pensions in pay, presumes that workers have a call option on the investment earnings in excess of the interest rate assumption used to value the plan. The analysis indicates that wage offsets are potentially quite large, may be difficult to predict, and may vary substantially across firms. In addition, the case for policy action would appear to rest largely on the implicit assumption that workers misperceive the value of their pension benef