Bottlenecks for Evidence Adoption
研究了美国30个城市73项随机对照试验中,政府采纳助推措施的情况,发现证据强度和城市特征并非主要决定因素,而组织惯性是关键障碍。
Governments increasingly use RCTs to test innovations, yet we know little about how they incorporate results into policy-making. We study 30 U.S. cities that ran 73 RCTs with a national Nudge Unit. Cities adopt a nudge treatment into their communications in 27% of the cases. We find that the strength of the evidence and key city features do not strongly predict adoption; instead, the largest predictor is whether the RCT was implemented using pre-existing communication, as opposed to new communication. We identify organizational inertia as a leading explanation: changes to pre-existing infrastructure are more naturally folded into subsequent processes.