Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/299413 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-1548
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
Can societies be nudged to adopt beneficial behaviors? Publicizing how people behave on average-descriptive-norms nudging-has emerged as a key tool for increasing the adoption of desirable behaviors. While nudging, by describing social norms, has proven effective in one-shot interventions in small samples (marginal-effect designs), nudging on an ongoing basis at the population level may not necessarily lead to higher compliance and can give rise to major challenges. We use a simple model to show that social adjustment dynamics can drive a population's behavior in unanticipated directions. We propose a general approach to estimating equilibrium behavior and apply it to a study of mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our empirical findings align with the analytical approach and indicate that publicizing mask-wearing rates on an ongoing basis could have backfired, as initially high rates would have settled into substantially lower equilibrium rates of the behavior. In other words, if scaled up, positive marginal-effect designs do not necessarily translate into full compliance with the intervention.
Subjects: 
COVID-19
Social norms
Social distancing
Normative expectations
Empirical expectations
Compliance
JEL: 
D91
I18
H41
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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