Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period. In lab experiments, we find that while criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional. These lay beliefs reduce support for policies that make court information salient and increase support for punishment. Our findings suggest that criminal justice policies can be made more effective and humane by anticipating human error in unintentional offenses.

No abstract

No abstract

One psychological barrier impeding saving behavior is the inability to fully empathize with one’s future self. Future self interventions have improved savings by helping people overcome this obstacle. Despite the promise of such interventions, previous research has focused predominantly on hypothetical contexts and western settings where the target sample has been predominantly undergraduate. Do interventions that encourage people to more concretely consider their future selves during retirement still have a positive effect on behavior in consequential, real-world savings decisions? Using a field experiment in Mexico (N = 7,603), where less than 1% make a voluntary savings contribution annually, we developed a low-cost, easy-to-implement intervention to test whether concrete thinking about one’s future life improves recurring retirement savings signups relative to a status quo, control group. We find that future self decision aids significantly improved the likelihood of signing up for an automatic recurring savings plan by nearly four times compared to the control.

Individuals regularly struggle to save for retirement. Using a largescale field experiment (N=97,149) in Mexico, we test the effectiveness of several behavioral interventions relative to existing policy and each other geared towards improving voluntary retirement savings contributions. We find that an intervention framing savings as a way to secure one’s family future significantly improves contribution rates. We leverage recursive partitioning techniques and identify that the overall positive treatment effect masks sub-populations where the treatment is even more effective and other groups where the treatment has a significant negative effect, decreasing contribution rates. Accounting for this variation is significant for theoretical and policy development as well as firm profitability. Our work also provides a methodological framework for how to better design, scale, and deploy behavioral interventions to maximize their effectiveness.