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CEP/STICERD Applications Seminars

Mechanism design for personalized policy: A field experiment incentivizing behavior change

Rebecca Dizon-Ross (The University of Chicago Booth School of Business)

Monday 20 March 2023 12:00 - 13:30

Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events. Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.


About this event

Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when policies are vertically-differentiated and beneficiaries' types are unobservable, since beneficiaries may misreport their types to access the most generous policy variant. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer a menu of policy choices, and make it incentive-compatible for participants to choose the "right' variant (i.e., 2nd-degree price discrimination). Using a randomized controlled trial of incentives for exercise among roughly 6,000 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that 2nd-degree price discrimination substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect on exercise by 75% without increasing program costs relative to a one-size-fits-all benchmark. Second-degree price discrimination is effective because, consistent with mechanism design theory, it induces beneficial sorting of types across contracts. Second-degree price discrimination also performs favorably relative to another potential strategy for personalization: tagging based on observables (i.e., 3rd-degree price discrimination).

Applications (Applied Micro) Seminars are held on Mondays in term time at 12:00-13:30 in SAL 3.05 in person.

Seminar organiser: Maitreesh Ghatak

For further information please contact Sadia Ali: s.ali43@lse.ac.uk.

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