How to Communicate the Nudge: A Real-World Policy Experiment

Disclosure-based nudges are increasingly utilized by governments around the world to achieve policy goals related to health, safety, employment, environmental protection, retirement savings, debt, and more. Yet a critical aspect of these nudge-type policy interventions—the mode of communication—rema...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of law & economics 2022-08, Vol.65 (3), p.607-633
Main Authors: Bar-Gill, Oren, Cohen, Alma
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Collection
Communication strategies
Cooperation
Cost analysis
Creditors
Debt
Employment
Enforcement
Environmental protection
Retirement
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Disclosure-based nudges are increasingly utilized by governments around the world to achieve policy goals related to health, safety, employment, environmental protection, retirement savings, debt, and more. Yet a critical aspect of these nudge-type policy interventions—the mode of communication—remains unexplored. We study the effects of the communication medium on debt collection procedures, using a policy experiment conducted in cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Debtors often lack adequate information about the debt, the judgment, and the enforcement and collection procedures. As a result, the process of debt collection is often harmful to the debtor and ineffective in securing repayment. We manipulate the choice of medium—telephone, regular mail, text message, and video message—holding fixed the content of the communication. We find that digital communication strategies, in particular, communicating via text message, were the most cost-effective, significantly improving outcomes for both debtors and creditors.
ISSN:0022-2186
1537-5285
DOI:10.1086/718856