Nudges might be more effective closer to home
How an approach using social norms can improve council tax payment rates.
I am currently a Senior Data Scientist, focussed on experimental innovation, at Sony Interactive Entertainment. Previously, I was a Staff Quantitative UX Researcher at Facebook, and a Senior Advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team, based in London and New York City.
My academic interests lie at the intersection of behavioural public policy and political behaviour. I am currently completing a part-time PhD in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Posts
Research
The formality effect
This paper documents the existence of a ‘formality effect’ in government communications.
Testing local descriptive norms and salience of enforcement action: A field experiment to increase tax collection
The use of behavioral science interventions, and particularly social norms, in tax compliance is a growing industry for scholars and practitioners alike in recent years. However, the causal mechanism of these interventions is unknown, where effects could be explained by a pro-social desire to support one’s community, conditional cooperation, desire to conform, or fear of reprisals. We conduct a field experiment in local government taxation in the United Kingdom which tests the effectiveness of a social (descriptive) norm against a control condition and against messages that highlight the enforcement process. The social norm outperforms enforcement salience, suggesting that this explanation, although more powerful than the control, does not fully explain compliance effects. This study further provides evidence that social norm type interventions can be effective at the subnational level, a context where previous work has shown they may produce null effects.
