Humans versus Chatbots: Scaling-up behavioral interventions to reduce teacher shortages

Nicolás Ajzenman, Gregory Elacqua, Analia Jaimovich and Graciela Pérez-Nuñez

No 13010, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: Empirical results in economics often stem from success in controlled experimental settings, but often fail when scaled up. This study presents a behavioral intervention and a scalable equivalent aimed at reducing teacher shortages by motivating high school students to pursue an education degree. The intervention was delivered through WhatsApp chats by trained human promoters (humans arm) and rule-based Chatbots programmed to closely replicate the humans program (bots arm). Results show that the humans arm successfully increased high-school students demand for and enrollment in education majors, particularly among high-performing students. The bots arm showed positive but smaller and statistically insignificant effects. These findings indicate that a relatively low-cost intervention can effectively reduce teacher shortages, but scaling up such interventions may have limitations. Therefore,testing scalable solutions during the design stage of experiments is crucial.

Keywords: Teachers; Teacher policy; teacher shortages; scale-up; behavioral; bots (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I23 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... eacher-shortages.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:13010

DOI: 10.18235/0005059

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().