If you are going to pay within the next 24 hours, press 1: automatic planning prompt reduces credit card delinquency

People often form intentions but fail to follow through on them. Mounting evidence suggests that such intention-action gaps can be narrowed with prompts to make concrete plans about when, where and how to act to achieve the intention. In this paper we pushed the notion of plan-concreteness to test the efficacy of a prompt under a minimalist automated calling setting, where respondents were only prompted to indicate a narrower duration within which they intent to act. In a field experiment this planning prompt significantly helped people to pay their past dues and get out of debt delinquency. These results suggest that minimalist automatic planning prompts are a scalable, cost-effective intervention.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jcpy.1031Published versio

When retailing and Las Vegas meet: probabilistic free price promotions

A number of retailers offer gambling- or lottery-type price promotions with a chance to receive one’s entire purchase for free. Although these retailers seem to share the intuition that probabilistic free price promotions are attractive to consumers, it is unclear how they compare to traditional sure price promotions of equal expected monetary value. We compared these two risky and sure price promotions for planned purchases across six experiments in the field and in the laboratory. Together, we found that consumers are not only more likely to purchase a product promoted with a probabilistic free discount over the same product promoted with a sure discount but that they are also likely to purchase more of it. This preference seems to be primarily due to a diminishing sensitivity to the prices. In addition, we find that the zero price effect, transaction cost, and novelty considerations are likely not implicated.https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2328Published versio

Replicating the effect of moral standards accessibility on dishonesty, author’s response to the replication attempt

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2515245918769062Accepted manuscriptPublished versio

A practitioner's guide to nudging

Supporting documentatio

Dishonesty in everyday life and its policy implications

Dishonest acts are all too prevalent in day-to-day life. In the current review, we examine some possible psychological causes for such dishonesty that go beyond the standard economic considerations of probability and value of external payoffs. We propose a general model of dishonest behavior that includes also internal psychological reward mechanisms for honesty and dishonesty, and we point to the implications of this model in terms of curbing dishonesty

Providing health checks as incentives to retain blood donors — evidence from two field experiments

The collection of blood given by donors has proven to be a substantial societal and a managerial challenge. Consequently, blood donation services seek for incentive mechanisms to retain donors. However, economic or material rewards might entail negative side effects such as motivational crowding out or even attracting “bad blood”. In an effort to increase the retention of established blood donors, we conducted two randomized field trials (N1 = 53,257, N2 = 31,522) in cooperation with the German Red Cross Blood Donation Service and tested the effectiveness of an incentive strategy that is directly related to the blood donation itself: offering a comprehensive blood health check. Contrary to previous related research, we found substantial positive effects of a comprehensive blood health check incentive on donation behavior. In addition, unlike previous studies, we examine effects of repeated exposure to this incentive and do not find any wearout effects. Considering the positive effect of this incentive on donor retention and the relative low cost for providing this service to donors, our findings suggest that offering comprehensive blood health check incentives is a viable and cost-efficient marketing strategy to increase the retention among previous donors even if offered over the longer run.Accepted manuscrip

Large stakes and big mistakes

Most upper-management and sales force personnel, as well as workers in many other jobs, are paid based on performance, which is widely perceived as motivating effort and enhancing productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards can in some cases produce supra-optimal motivation, resulting in a decline in performance. To test whether very high monetary rewards can decrease performance, we conducted a set of experiments at MIT, the University of Chicago, and rural India. Subjects in our experiment worked on different tasks and received performance-contingent payments that varied in amount from small to large relative to their typical levels of pay. With some important exceptions, we observed that high reward levels can have detrimental effects on performance

Toward a taxonomy and review of honesty interventions

What types of honesty interventions have been tested and to what extent? We conducted a systematic literature review of single-element intervention studies designed to curtail individual-level dishonesty and classified the obtained interventions in a taxonomy that encompasses three frameworks: nudging, economic, and internal-reward. We find moral reminders that we classify as educative nudges as well as external commitments (pledges, oaths, honor codes) and priming that we classify under the internal-reward framework to be the most frequently studied interventions, whereas architectural nudges (defaults, sludge) have hardly been developed. Most importantly, we identify two areas for improvement essential for our collective ability to successfully translate and scale honesty interventions: a more thorough examination of the interventions’ underlying psychological processes and precise description of the experimental design.https://psyarxiv.com/7x4k6/Accepted manuscrip

Effectiveness of planning prompts on organizations’ likelihood to file their overdue taxes: a multi-wave field experiment

This paper investigates the effectiveness of planning prompts on organizations’ tax compliance behavior. We conducted a large-scale, multi-wave field experiment examining the tax-paying behavior of all organizations that failed to file timely annual returns for a payroll tax in the province of Ontario. Organizations were randomly assigned to receive one of two letters: Ontario’s standard late notice (control) and a revised experimental late notice, which included step-by-step instructions of when, where and how to file a return. Our data indicate that planning prompts are effective at increasing organizations’ timely tax payment. In addition to replicating these findings across two waves, we demonstrate that while our intervention did not appear to have effects that persisted across tax years, organizations also did not habituate to our manipulation and its effects were consistent across repeated exposures. Our study is among the first to demonstrate that a simple behavioral intervention that has typically been applied to individuals to help them to act upon their existing motivations can be effective in the realm of tax compliance and organizational behavior.https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3744Published versio