Journal of Political Economy Vol. 132 No. 8 2024
Bottlenecks for Evidence Adoption
open access
Abstract
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.
- DOI
- 10.1086/729447
- Volume
- 132
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 2748-2789
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib