Do healthy home checklists nudge people to test their home for radon? Evidence from a randomised control trial

Jane Howe and Ganga Shreedhar

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Radon degrades indoor air quality and is the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. We examined if a ‘Healthy Home Checklist’ nudged households to purchase a radon test online. We used a cluster randomised control trial with 15,043 households across 22 postal route groups in Ottawa. Treated households were mailed postcards with a checklist that framed testing for radon as a routine action to check air quality and keep a healthy home. It also included a vendor website link where people could buy a test kit online. The control group did not receive a postcard. More test kits were purchased in the treated clusters but the takeup was low – only seven tests were purchased in the treated groups and one test in the control. Our result suggests that this nudge was not necessarily cost-effective.

Keywords: radon; air quality; risk communication; nudge; experiment; checklist; friction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D81 D84 D91 I12 Q53 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2020-09-04
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