Abstract

Existing research demonstrates how governments can use insights from behavioral science to design policy and alter residents’ behavior. This article proposes that the effect of behavioral interventions may be different in hierarchical organizations where the decision to change behavior and the execution of that decision are split between different individuals. We examine the effect of two small-scale interventions—personal reminders and financial incentives—in a large-scale field experiment with public schools in Denmark. The Ministry of Education invited a representative sample of public schools to adopt a program that provides information on students’ socio-emotional competencies. Results show that small financial incentives increased managers’ adoption of the program by 7 percentage points. Frontline workers’ subsequent data generation and performance information acquisition were also increased in the incentive treatment groups, even though the latter was not incentivized. Reminders paired with incentives had an impact on the managers’ adoption, but the reminder effect disappeared during the implementation phase. These findings demonstrate both the potentials and limitations of applying behavioral research on individual residents to hierarchical organizations.

中文翻译：

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提示和激励措施可以改善政府内部的执行情况吗？实地实验的证据

摘要

现有研究表明，政府如何利用行为科学的见解来设计政策并改变居民的行为。本文提出，行为干预的效果在等级组织中可能有所不同，在这些组织中，改变行为的决定和该决定的执行被划分在不同的个人之间。在丹麦公立学校的大规模实地实验中，我们研究了两种小规模干预措施（个人提醒和经济激励措施）的效果。教育部邀请有代表性的公立学校样本通过一项计划，以提供有关学生的社会情感能力的信息。结果表明，少量的财务激励措施使管理人员对计划的采用提高了7个百分点。即使未对激励措施进行激励，在激励措施组中也增加了前线工人随后的数据生成和绩效信息获取。提醒与激励相结合对经理的采用产生了影响，但提醒效果在实施阶段消失了。这些发现证明了将行为研究应用于个体居民到分层组织的潜力和局限性。