incentives

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Boosting Transit Ridership – $2 at a Time

A majority of commuters in the US choose to drive alone. We aimed to understand the influence of monetary incentives and anchoring on the transportation choices of residents in Los Angeles, California. Our key results included willingness to accept values averaging around $7, a difference in acceptance rates between anchoring treatment groups, and a significant change in acceptance rates when shown double-digit compared to single-digit values. This presents an opportunity for transit-based companies to invest in monetary incentive schemes to boost sustainable mode use.

Using Behavioral Science to Improve a Referral Program

How do you use a referral program to motivate people? We ran a large-scale experiment aimed at increasing referral volumes at our staffing company. The details of the experiment were motivated by concepts in behavioral science, specifically something called present bias. Many of our colleagues were surprised by what we found.

By |2022-12-06T01:59:46+00:00August 14th, 2022|Categories: Business & Management, Technology & Digital, Work & Employment|Tags: , , |

Getting It Done – The Behavioral Way

Many people struggle to finish big projects. According to a 2020 survey, almost half of teleworkers had trouble getting motivated. Behavioral science can help! Here are some tips for accomplishing those daunting tasks.

Do Lab Studies Replicate in the Field? The Case of Simplified Nutrition Labels

There is a growing concern that the academic literature, because of publication biases and other limitations of single-shot, lab-based studies, overstates the power of nudges in real life. We examined this issue in a 10-week RCT in 60 supermarkets comparing 4 front-of-pack simplified nutrition labels. The good news is that the ordering of the nutrition labels was the same as in published lab-based studies. The bad news is that our effect sizes were, on average, 17 times smaller than in the published literature.

Sports in the Service of Economics

An increasing number of academic studies have used sports data to investigate economic behavior. Sports data are not only readily available, they also provide an excellent laboratory to study human behavior in real competitive environments. In this article, I will present several examples of my own work that have used sports data to explain fundamental economic theories, as well as articles that showed divergences of economic decision making from neo-classical theories.

Charge for Use or Nudge to Reuse? Interventions to Discourage Plastic Consumption

Gauri Chandra discusses the negative implications of charging for single-use plastic bags and suggests alternative behavioural interventions.

Stop Chasing the Past: Improving Investment Decisions with Social Disclaimers

Mutual funds cannot consistently return better-than-average performance. Yet investors often pick their mutual funds based on past performance. Researchers Leonardo Weiss-Cohen, Philip Newall and Peter Ayton conducted a long-term Think Forward Initiative research project that sought to answer how their investment decisions could be improved.

Behavioral Insights for Old Age Planning

It’s almost impossible to rationally plan old age, given that decisions in this domain are complex, jointly made and emotional. I argue that behavioral economics can help us understand some of our common decision-making barriers, such as dealing with decision avoidance, reframing old age positively, and designing interventions to better forecast our needs in old age.

When Awards Backfire

People use awards to incentivize positive behaviors all the time. Our research shows that, in some contexts, awards do not work and can even demotivate the target behavior. We find that awards might send unintended signals to recipients about the social norms and institutional expectations for the target behavior. Organizations and leaders considering using awards should know that awards can have more complicated consequences that might be intuitively expected.

No I Won’t, but Yes We Will: How the Social Side of Decision-Making and Behavior Is Worthy of a Closer Look

By Guy Champniss   I still have vivid memories of when I was little and I started to misbehave, my mother would bend down and whisper something in my ear. Each time, it was the same thing. And each time, it stopped me dead in my tracks. ‘People are watching you’ she’d say. I’d look around [...]

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