How effective is nudging? A quantitative review on the effect sizes and limits of empirical nudging studies

By Dennis Hummel, Alexander Maedche. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2019

427 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Changes in the choice architecture, so-called nudges, have been employed in a variety of contexts to alter people's behavior. Although nudging has gained a widespread popularity, the effect sizes of its influences vary considerably across studies. In addition, nudges have proven to be ineffective or even backfire in selected studies which raises the question whether, and under which conditions, nudges are effective. Therefore, we conduct a quantitative review on nudging with 100 primary publications including 317 effect sizes from different research areas. We derive four key results. (1) A morphological box on nudging based on eight dimensions, (2) an assessment of the effectiveness of different nudging interventions, (3) a categorization of the relative importance of the application context and the nudge category, and (4) a comparison of nudging and digital nudging. Thereby, we shed light on the (in)effectiveness of nudging and we show how the findings of the past can be used for future research. Practitioners, especially government officials, can use the results to review and adjust their policy making.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a36a3f3d03404171a7277331bb21da3f839151ca

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Citations in the corpus

RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units (2020, methodology): “In a recent meta-analysis, Hummel and Maedche (2019) select 100 papers screened out of over 2,000 initial papers identified as having “nudge” or “nudging” in the title, abstract, or keyword.”
The ethics of nudging: An overview (2020, background): “As long as enough nudge interventions work—as seems to be the case—and we can separate effective from ineffective nudge policies, the nudge approach can still produce valuable policies (Arno & Thomas, 2016; Hummel & Maedche, 2019).”
Mitigating climate change via food consumption and food waste: A systematic map of behavioral interventions (2020, result): “This is a finding in line with other policy areas where behavioral informed regulation is increasingly applied and investigated, with a marked increase in the mid 2010 years (Hummel and Maedche, 2019) and”