Active Choice Interventions at Scale: Browser Defaults under the Digital Markets Act

Jesper Akesson, Kush Amlani, Raul Cepeda Suarez, Emily Chissell, Stefan Hunt, Michael Luca and Gemma Petrie

No 35112, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Can active choice mitigate preset-default effects? Implementing a difference-indifferences design around the EU Digital Markets Act’s choice-screen mandate, we find that choice screens increased Firefox usage by 91 percent on iOS and by 13 percent on Android, relative to a no-mandate counterfactual. The gap in effect size between iOS and Android is consistent with the fact that choice screens on Android primarily reached new devices, whereas it also reached existing users on iOS.

JEL-codes: D03 K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dcm, nep-pay and nep-reg
Note: IO LE PE PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35112.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:35112

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35112
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 ().