Dilip Soman: The Challenges (and Opportunities) of Scaling Choice Architecture Interventions

Conférencier : Dilip Soman (BEAR, UoT)

Invité par : Sabine Kröger

Choice architecture interventions are now being increasingly used in deploying behavioural interventions on a large scale, with the goal of helping citizens make better decisions. Many of these interventions are designed by mimicking other successful projects, or by conceptually extending ideas from published academic research. In this talk, I will describe two such specific interventions in the area of financial wellbeing. The first intervention is an initiative by the government in South Korea on helping consumers make better spending decisions while using credit cards by sending text messaging alerts after every instance of credit card use. The second set of interventions in Mexico use a redesigned pension account statement and text messaging alerts designed to motivate and remind citizens to make (recommended) voluntary contributions to their pension accounts. Both sets of interventions were designed on the basis of a conceptual analysis of evidence published in the behavioural sciences.

Results in both cases show that while the intervention worked for a subset of the target population, it did not work (and in some cases, actively backfired) for others. Our results point to the importance of pre-testing interventions especially in domains where we expect strong context dependence. We also advocate capturing the heterogeneity in response effects by using machine learning techniques.