A Social Norm Nudge to Save More: A Field Experiment at a Retail Bank

How much to save? Decision costs and retirement plan participation

“…Finally, it could be that the information about other servicemembers' decisions contained in the specific rate treatments affected servicemembers' behavior by creating or reinforcing a descriptive social norm in favor of TSP participation. Although we cannot rule this mechanism out, recent research suggests that peer effects tend not to be effective (and may in fact backfire) at increasing the savings rate among low-saving populations like the one we study (Beshears et al, 2015;Lieber and Skimmyhorn, 2018;Dur et al, 2019). In addition, the fact that the marginal enrollees from the specific rate treatments choose passively with respect to their fund allocation (Table 5) is consistent with a model of decision costs operating as a barrier to enrollment but would not be implied by a model driven by social norms (since the letters do not describe the funds chosen by other servicemembers).…”

Personalized Communication Strategies: Towards A New Debtor Typology Framework

“…Several studies have investigated how financial decision making can be influenced (or nudged) in the context of tax repayment [John & Blume, 2018], saving strategy [Dur et al, 2021], and consumer behavior [Demarque et al, 2015]. The concept and theory of nudging is based on the work of Thaler & Sunstein [2009] who proposed a list of nudges, aiming to adapt the choice architecture of a decision in a way that alters behavior in a predictable way.…”

Framing and Social Information Nudges at Wikipedia

“…18 Exactly 50% of participants were female, 21% have an age between 40-49 and almost 13% are older than 60 (see Table B1). After exposure to a banner, 15 Note the difference to Dur et al (2021), who document that a social norm nudge affected clicks but not actual behavioral responses (savings). 16 We used survey data on WMDE usage across different age groups to derive sample quota in the different age bins.…”

“…It has been successfully applied, e.g., to increase payments of tax debt (Hallsworth et al, 2017), to reduce private energy consumption (Allcott, 2011) or to raise contributions to online communities (Chen et al, 2010). At the same time, there is a growing body of evidence documenting that social information nudges -similar to other nudges (Sunstein, 2017) -often fail to induce behavioral change (e.g., Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019;Dimant et al, 2020;Dur et al, 2021;Fellner et al, 2013).…”