Behavioral insights or nudges have yielded great benefits for toda's public administrators by improving the quality of official messages and increasing revenue flows. In the absence of a large number of studies suitable for meta-analysis, less is known about the external validity of these interventions, their range of impact, and the exact matching of the behavioral cue to the client group and context. Factorial designs and repeated interventions, as in the study reported in this article, can add insight through respectively comparing interventions and analyzing their impacts over time. This randomized controlled trial tests whether simplification and/or a descriptive social norm can increase payment of local taxes in a central London local authority. In the first wave, a factorial design on a targeted group of residents, simplification increased the number of people paying by four percentage points, whereas the social norm did not change behavior. In wave two of the study, which was carried out across all households, the descriptive social norm backfired, reducing the rate of payment. The heterogeneous nature of the target population and the exact wording of the social norm are discussed as possible reasons for these results.
Public authorities want to ensure that more citizens transact online; but they also face a minority for whom paper and face‐to‐face interactions are still preferred or needed. When citizens depend on public services, a nudge might be the best way to encourage them to shift channels. This approach is especially important when there is still a digital divide between those who regularly use online services and those who do not. Using cues developed from behavioral sciences, this article reports the results from a randomized controlled trial carried out in 2014 in Essex, England, where 5,817 users of a disability parking scheme (Blue Badge) were encouraged by the local council to renew online, either by a standard (control) letter, a simplified letter, one conveying collective benefit by appealing to the cost savings that could be achieved, and a group where a messenger communicated the desirability of online renewal. Both the simplification and the collective benefit treatments increased online renewals by six percentage points whereas the messenger had no effect. The experiment shows that nudges can be used by public authorities to encourage citizens to use online services irrespective of their age and level of deprivation.
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