How to Communicate the Nudge: A Real-World Policy Experiment
通过与以色列司法部合作的政策实验，研究电话、邮件、短信和视频等不同沟通媒介对债务催收效果的影响，发现短信等数字方式最具成本效益，能同时改善债务人和债权人的结果。
Disclosure-based nudges are increasingly utilized by governments around the world to achieve policy goals related to health, safety, employment, environmental protection, retirement savings, debt, and more. Yet a critical aspect of these nudge-type policy interventions—the mode of communication—remains unexplored. We study the effects of the communication medium on debt collection procedures, using a policy experiment conducted in cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Debtors often lack adequate information about the debt, the judgment, and the enforcement and collection procedures. As a result, the process of debt collection is often harmful to the debtor and ineffective in securing repayment. We manipulate the choice of medium—telephone, regular mail, text message, and video message—holding fixed the content of the communication. We find that digital communication strategies, in particular, communicating via text message, were the most cost-effective, significantly improving outcomes for both debtors and creditors.