Incentives and Unintended Consequences: Spillover Effects in Food Choice

Manuela Angelucci, Silvia Prina, Heather Royer and Anya Samek

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2019, vol. 11, issue 4, 66-95

Abstract: Little is known about how peers influence the impact of incentives. We study how peers' actions and incentives can lead to peer spillover effects. Using a field experiment on snack choice in the school lunchroom (choice of grapes versus cookies), we randomize who receives incentives, the fraction of peers incentivized, and whether or not it can be observed that peers' choices are incentivized. We show that, while peers' actions of picking grapes have a positive spillover effect on children's take-up of grapes, seeing that peers are incentivized to pick grapes has a negative spillover effect on take-up. When incentivized choices are public, incentivizing all children to pick grapes, relative to incentivizing none, has no statistically significant effect on take-up, as the negative spillover offsets the positive impacts of incentives.

JEL-codes: C93 D12 I21 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170588
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170588 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170588.data (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170588.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170588.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aejpol:v:11:y:2019:i:4:p:66-95

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy is currently edited by Matthew Shapiro

More articles in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().