Nudging down theft from insecure vehicles. A pilot study

This report presents the preliminary findings of a pilot study to reduce thefts from cars committed against insecure vehicles, using the behavioural insights or ‘nudge approach’. The recipients of the ‘nudges’ were potential victims of theft from insecure vehicles living in high rate areas for this crime, where a bespoke leaflet campaign was developed to nudge vehicle owners into thinking more carefully when leaving their vehicles unattended, particularly when left on their driveways overnight. Although somewhat tentative at this stage, the preliminary findings indicate that the percentage of thefts committed against insecure vehicles in the two treatment areas was reduced significantly when compared with the two control group areas where no nudge interventions were introduced. This demonstrates that if appropriate nudges (grounded in psychological theory) are coupled with and delivered by appropriate messengers, the prosocial behavioural change can be encouraged which can lead to a reduction in criminal behaviour and opportunities for crim

Intertwining relations for one-dimensional diffusions and application to functional inequalities

International audienceFollowing the recent work [13] fulfilled in the discrete case, we pro- vide in this paper new intertwining relations for semigroups of one-dimensional diffusions. Various applications of these results are investigated, among them the famous variational formula of the spectral gap derived by Chen and Wang [15] together with a new criterion ensuring that the logarithmic Sobolev inequality holds. We complete this work by revisiting some classical examples, for which new estimates on the optimal constants are derived