Reputation as a lever
Whether it’s an effort to increase recycling, reduce energy use, or cut carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom says that the best way to get people to do the right thing is to make it worth their while with cold, hard cash. But there may be an easier, cheaper way: appealing to a person’s sense of reputation. Using enrollment of thousands of people in a California blackout prevention program as an experimental test bed, a research team found that although financial incentives boosted participation slightly, making participation in the program observable — through the use of sign-up sheets posted in apartment buildings — produced a threefold increase. The team included Erez Yoeli, a researcher at the Federal Trade Commission; Moshe Hoffman, a visiting researcher in Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED); David Rand, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at PED and now a professor at Yale; and PED Director Martin Nowak. “We wanted to see...