Schools worldwide distribute information to parents about their children’s academic performance. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly low-income parents, from accessing this information to make decisions? A field experiment in Malawi shows that, at baseline, parents’ beliefs about their children’s academic performance are often inaccurate. Providing parents with clear, digestible performance information causes them to update their beliefs and adjust their investments: they increase the school enrollment of their higher-performing children, decrease the enrollment of lower-performing children, and choose educational inputs that are more closely matched to their children’s academic level. Heterogeneity analysis suggests information frictions are worse among the poor.

Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to misreport their type. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer an “incentive‐compatible” menu of policy choices designed to induce participants to select the variant intended for their type. Using a field experiment that personalized incentives for exercise among 6,800 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that personalizing with an incentive‐compatible choice menu substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect of incentives on exercise by 80% without increasing incentive costs relative to a one‐size‐fits‐all benchmark. Offering choice achieves similar performance to personalizing with an extensive set of observable variables, but without the same data requirements.

How does the expectation that a child will receive government benefits in adulthood affect parental investments in the child’s human capital? Most parents whose children receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits overestimate the likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood. We present randomly selected families with the predicted likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood. Reducing parents’ expectations that children will receive benefits in adulthood does not increase investments in children’s human capital. This zero effect is precisely estimated. Likely explanations include parents working more themselves, nonfinancial goals influencing investment, and families facing investment constraints.