The Promise and Limits of Digital Nudges: Personalized School Recommendations in Recife’s Centralized Admission Platform

Gregory Elacqua, Macarena Kutscher, Danielle Nascimento, Isabella Dias and Juan Francisco Margitic

No 14420, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: Despite improvements in access to information, digital platforms, and centralized school admission systems, many parents continue to choose seemingly lower-quality schools, often prioritizing proximity over academic performance. We examine the role of information provision in this context through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) within the centralized admission platform of Recife, Brazil testing whether personalized school recommendations influence parental choice. Specifically, we implemented two treatment arms: one offering recommendations that ranked schools by quality within a defined distance (quality treatment), and another ranking schools solely by proximity (distance treatment). While the overall impact of the treatments was limited, we do find meaningful positive effects among users who actively engaged (”compliers”) with the recommendations (1424% of families). Compliers in the quality treatment were more likely to select higher-performing schools, particularly among first-grade applicants and families without strong prior preferences. These findings underscore both the promise of digital nudges in improving school choices and the challenges of deploying such tools in recently centralized systems, where many families enter with preset preferences and limited familiarity with the process.

Keywords: school choice; Information Provision; Digital Nudges; Randomized Controlled Trials; Centralized Admission Systems; Parental School Choice Behavior; Digital Nudges and Engagement; Challenges in Centralized Admission; Decision.making; Education, childhood, equality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 I21 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-nud and nep-pay
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:14420

DOI: 10.18235/0013854

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