Increasing responsiveness of civil servants. A field experiment on freedom of information compliance
通过在布宜诺斯艾利斯市进行实地实验，重新设计信息自由请求通知，发现行为干预虽未显著提高整体合规率，但使准时截止日回复比例增加10.7个百分点（提高200%），并揭示了机构内部溢出效应。
Previous research has examined the impact of financial incentives on public sector performance, but there is limited evidence on how non-financial incentives influence civil servants’ behavior—particularly in encouraging compliance with secondary tasks such as responding to freedom-of-information (FOI) requests. Although these tasks are not formally linked to performance evaluations, they are essential for promoting government transparency and building public trust. To address this gap, we conducted a field experiment in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where we redesigned the FOI request notice to incorporate behavioral insights—such as salience, clarity, deterrence, and social norms— expected to increase civil servants’ compliance. Although the intervention did not significantly increase overall compliance, it substantially shifted the timing of responses: the proportion submitted exactly on the FOI law’s final deadline rose by 10.7 pp (a 200% increase). This finding suggests that the stronger adherence to the deadlines created by making them more salient outweighed any potential reduction in response time from the other behavioral elements in the redesigned notice. We also found evidence of (i) intra-agency spillovers, showing that the notices changed the civil servants’ information set, and (ii) higher compliance as a result of our intervention when agencies were not simultaneously exposed to government-led training workshops. This study contributes to the literature on civil servant performance, non-financial incentives, and transparency initiatives, highlighting the potential of low-cost, easily scalable interventions to improve bureaucratic responsiveness in developing countries.