The Impact of Defaults on Technology Adoption, and its Underappreciation by Policymakers

Peter Bergman and Todd Rogers

No 6721, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We conduct an experiment to understand how enrollment defaults affect the take up and impact of an education technology. We show that a standard and simplified opt-in process induce low take up. Automatically enrolling parents increases adoption significantly and improves student achievement. Our surveys show automatic enrollment is uncommon because its impact is underestimated: District leaders overestimate take-up under the standard condition by 38 percentage points and underestimate take-up under automatic enrollment by 31 percentage points. After learning the actual take-up rates, there is a 140% increase in willingness to pay for the technology when shifting implementation to automatic enrollment.

Keywords: adoption; defaults; technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Working Paper: The Impact of Defaults on Technology Adoption, and Its Underappreciation by Pollicymakers (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6721

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