Nudge Database IV

Part IV of the Nudge Database.

Part I || Part II || Part III || Part IV || Part V || Part VI || Part VII || Part VIII || Part IX || Part X || @Makeuya 


31.
Nudge: Hanks et al. looked at encouraging healthier eating in school lunchrooms through strategic placement of certain foods. One of two lunch lines was arranged so as to display healthier foods. In the healthier line, sales of healthier food increased by18% and grams of less healthy food consumed decreased by 28%.
Rozin et al. did something similar and found making a food harder to reach or changing the serving utensil at a salad bar from a spoon to tongs reduced intake of unhealthy food by 8-16%. The graph concerns this paper. 

Tags: eating / school lunchroom / convenience 

Source: Hanks et al. (2012), 'Healthy Convenience:Nudging Students Toward Healthier Choices in the Lunchroom', Journal of Public Health.
Rozin et al. (2011), ‘Nudge to nobesity I: Minor changes in accessibility decrease food intake’,
Judgment and Decision Making. 


32.
Nudge: A large scale field experiment in Austria tested the varying effectiveness of normative messages in letters sent to potential evaders of TV license-fees. The mailings in general proved effective at raising compliance with the ‘threat’ treatment being the most effective. In this context social normative messages and moral suasion proved ineffective at changing behavior. The messages looked like this: 
(i) Threat: “If you do not respond to this letter, we will contact you personally” 
(ii) Moral Appeal: “Those who do not conscientiously register their not only violate the law, but also harm all honest households. Hence, registering is also a matter of fairness.” 
(iii) Social normative appeal: “Do you actually know that almost all citizens comply with this legal duty? In fact, 94 percent have registered.

Tags: normative messages  / tv-licenses / compliance 

Source: Fellner et al. (2011) ‘Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field -Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information’, Journal of the European Economic Association.

33.
Nudge: A field experiment in Switzerland looked at the effects of moral suasion messages in letters (i.e. “Paying your taxes is the right thing to do”) sent to taxpayers. In line with other experiments using moral suasion, it found that moral suasion implorations had essentially no effect on tax compliance behavior. 

Tags: moral suasion / normative messages / tax compliance 

Source: Torgler (2004) 'Moral Suasion: An alternative tax policy strategy? Evidence from a controlled field experiment in Switzerland', Economics of Governance.  


34.
Nudge: A field experiment conducted in stores in California tested whether purchasing behavior was affected when prices for some goods were raised at the till or on the price-tag. The authors found that tax-inclusive price tags reduced demand by 8%, likely due to them being much more salient.
  
Tags: salience / taxation / tax incidence 

Source: Chetty et al. (2009), 'Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence', NBER Working Paper. 


35.
Nudge: Karlan et al. developed a model of limited attention in intertemporal choice, predicting that reminders may increase saving and that they will be more effective when they increase the salience of a specific expenditure. 

Tags: saving / intertemporal choice / salience 

Source: Karlan et al. (2010), 'Getting to the Top of Mind: How Reminders Increase Saving', NBER Working Paper. 


36.
Nudge: This paper looks at framing effects in healthcare. When patients are told that 90% of those who have a certain operation are alive after five years, they are more likely to have the operation than when they are told that after five years, 10% of patients are dead. 

Tags: framing / healthcare  

Source: McNeil et al. (1982) 'On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies', New England Journal of Medicine.


37.
Nudge: This paper looks at risk preferences. An interesting example is the premium that people are willing to pay for zero-risk through the following hyopthetical: “Consider a $10 pesticide that produces a toxic reaction 15 times for every 10,000 times used. How much is an equally effective pesticide worth if it reduces the risk to 10 /5/0 incidences per 10,000 uses?” Results showed people would pay $1.04 extra for the reduction from 15 to 10 reactions and $2.41 extra for the reduction from 5 to 0. People value absolute elimination of risk disproportionately more than mere reduction in probability of harm.  

Tags :  risk aversion / certainty effect / pesticide 

Source:  Viscusi et al. (1987), 'An Investigation of the Rationality of Consumer Valuations of Multiple Health Risks', RAND Journal of Economics. 


38.
Nudge: Loss aversion in healthcare –people do not treat foregone gains the same way as equivalent losses. In this case authors note that patients are reluctant to take chloramphenicol (one in 25,000 risk of death) but are also reluctant to get hepatitis vaccinations (one in 10,000 chance of preventing death). 

Tags: loss aversion / healthcare / inconsistent preferences 

Source: Redelmeier et al (1993), 'Understanding patients' decisions. Cognitive and emotional perspectives', Journal of the American Medical Association. 


39.
Nudge: A paper examining the power of normative messages on a poster to encourage people to take the stairs. Results suggest messages using a norm-framework were more effective than generic-information posters. While the context is small, the paper notes that prior to this there was scant available research on the effectiveness of normative appeals on health behavior'

Tags: normative messages /norms / exercise / healthcare 

Source: Slaunwhite, J. (2008), 'Using normative messages to increase healthy behaviours', International Journal of Workplace Health Management. 


40.
Nudge: Wood et al. examined whether perceptions of other people’s alcohol consumption influenced one’s own perception of the riskiness of their drinking. The authors found that how a person ranked their drinking in the context of others’ predicted perceptions of developing alcohol disorders. 

Tags:  ranking / alcohol /risk 

Source: Wood et al. (2012), 'Social norm influences on evaluations of the risks associated with alcohol consumption:applying the rank-based decision by sampling model to health judgments', Alcohol and Alcoholism.