Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise

Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Ariel D. Zucker

No 33624, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to misreport their type. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer an “incentive-compatible” menu of policy choices designed to induce participants to select the variant intended for their type. Using a field experiment that personalized incentives for exercise among 6,800 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that personalizing with an incentive-compatible choice menu substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect of incentives on exercise by 80% without increasing program costs relative to a one-size-fits-all benchmark. Mechanism design achieves similar performance to personalizing with an extensive set of observable variables, but without the high data requirements or the risk that participants might manipulate their observables.

JEL-codes: D82 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
Note: DEV EH LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33624.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:33624

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33624
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().