When do "Nudges" Increase Welfare?

We thank Victoria Pu for exceptional research assistance. We thank Anna Grummon, Christina Roberto, Cass Sunstein, and seminar participants at the Geneva School of Economics and Management, the NBER Public Economics spring meeting, the NBER Roybal Conference, the NBER Summer Institute, New York University, Pompeu Fabra, Stanford GSB, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, UC Berkeley, and the University of Copenhagen for helpful comments. We thank the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Institute on Aging (via the NBER Roybal Center grant #P30AG034532), and Time Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences for grant funding. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-2234667. The experiment was approved by Institutional Review Boards at NYU (protocol number FY2020-3805) and Berkeley (#2020-08-13558) and was registered in the American Economic Association Registry for randomized trials (available from www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/7460) and at ClinicalTrials.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05038163). Because most of our empirical analyses involve a structural model that would have been difficult to pre-specify, we did not submit a pre-analysis plan with the pre-registration. Replication files are available from allcott.stanford.edu/research/. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry

• December 7, 2022