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on Nudge and Boosting |
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Issue of 2024‒10‒07
three papers chosen by Marco Novarese, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale |
| By: | Banerjee, Sanchayan; Picard, Julien |
| Abstract: | Adopting low-carbon diets is important to meet our climate goals. Prior experimental evidence suggests green nudges help people adopt such diets, more so when encouraged to think through them. In this paper, we re-evaluate this role of reflection in a “social norm” nudge to promote intentions for climate-friendly diets in the United Kingdom. Using 5, 555 English respondents, we find that the social norm nudge increases meal order intentions for low-carbon diets versus the control condition. Asking people to reveal their personal dietary norms after exposing them to these social norms (“lower-order nudge+”) does not produce any measurable change compared to the nudge. However, when people are subsequently encouraged to think and pledge to climate-friendly diets (“higher-order nudge+”), the effectiveness of the social norm nudge increases by 90% or more. |
| Keywords: | commitment; nudge; nudge+; personal norms; social norms |
| JEL: | J1 |
| Date: | 2023–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:120057 |
| By: | Pol Campos-Mercade; Armando N. Meier; Stephan Meier; Devin G. Pope; Florian H. Schneider; Erik Wengström |
| Abstract: | Whether monetary incentives to change behavior work and how they should be structured are fundamental economic questions. We overcome typical data limitations in a large-scale field experiment on vaccination (N = 5, 324) with a unique combination of administrative and survey data. We find that guaranteed incentives of $20 increase uptake by 13 percentage points in the short run and 9 in the long run. Guaranteed incentives are more effective than lottery-based, prosocial, or individually-targeted incentives, though all boost vaccinations. There are no unintended consequences on future vaccination or heterogeneities based on vaccination attitudes and incentivized economic preferences. Further, administrative data on relatives shows substantial positive spillovers. Our findings demonstrate the great potential of incentives for improving public health and provide guidance on their design. |
| JEL: | C93 D01 D62 I12 I18 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32899 |
| By: | Nicholas A. Wright (Department of Economics, Florida International University); Puneet Arora (Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, India); Jesse Wright (Florida Gulf Coast University) |
| Abstract: | Students often start a course with high expectations and an ambitious plan of action. Some instructors use goal-inducing non-binding commitment pledges to nudge students to follow through on their intended course of action. Using a field experiment, we asked treated students to set a goal grade, identify the actions they will take to achieve it, and sign a commitment pledge to work towards this grade. We find that while treated students pledged a greater time commitment and targeted a higher grade, their overall test scores decrease by 0.23 standard deviations and they were 15 percentage points less likely to pass the course. |
| Keywords: | Commitment Pledge, Goal-setting, Academic Performance, Overconfidence, Grade Expectations |
| JEL: | A2 C93 D8 I2 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fiu:wpaper:2411 |