A research group led by Professor Jun Kuroki of the Faculty of International Commerce, Yokohama City University, and Specially Appointed Associate Professor Shusaku Sasaki of the Behavioral Economics Unit, Research Center for Infectious Diseases, Osaka University, found that messages including the "nudge" of behavioral economics are reflected in local government budget formulation. I found that it might move budget assessors.
According to Yokohama City University, nudges refer to methods that encourage people to change their behavior in a predictable way without forbidding choices or significantly changing economic incentives. There are techniques for issuing messages that contain information such as "If you don't take that action, you will lose money" or "This is what others are doing".
The research group created a virtual environmental policy program to promote low carbonization.Randomly divide local government budget managers across the country into four groups,
・ Only the contents of the environmental policy program
・Add future results information to the content
・Attached to the content and results information is the message "If you do not implement the project, you will lose the opportunity to reduce carbon dioxide emissions."
・Attached a message to the content and result information that ``neighboring local governments are implementing the same project in advance.''
- We sent a questionnaire to evaluate the environmental policy program.
As a result, there was no statistically significant difference between the group that added the results information to the content and the group that only included the content, but the two groups with attached messages had significantly higher assessment results. Both of the messages sent to the two groups were based on the nudge method, and the research group believes that the effect of the nudge intervention moved the budget assessors.
Paper information:[Public Budgeting and Finance] Nudging public budget officers: A field-based survey experiment
