Hengchen Dai, PhD│CHIBE Research Seminar

Speaker(s)

• Hengchen Dai, PhD — Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and Behavioral Decision Making, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Event Description

Topic: “Scaling Nudges: The Roles of Baseline Intentions and Substitution Effects.”

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Abstract: Field experimentation and behavioral science have the potential to inform policy. Yet, many initially promising interventions show substantially lower efficacy at scale (e.g., List, 2024), reflecting the broader issue of the instability of experimental findings across contexts. We identify two important factors that can explain variation in estimated intervention efficacy across evaluations. We analyze data from (1) 123 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) from the nudge literature, covering over 20 million people, and (2) two RCTs (N = 187,134 and 149,720) encouraging COVID-19 vaccinations.  We find that intervention efficacy tends to be smaller (1) among individuals with low (vs. moderately high) baseline intentions to engage in the target activity and (2) when outcome measures are defined more broadly (vs. narrowly), as broader measures may better account for substitution effects and more accurately reflect net behavior change.  These findings help reconcile discrepancies in reported effect sizes—including the gap between academic- and government-led evaluations (Dellavigna & Linos, 2022)—and offer theoretical insight and actionable guidance  for selecting and scaling interventions.

Hengchen Dai, PhD is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations and of Behavioral Decision Making at the Anderson School of Management. She also co-directs the UCLA Health-Anderson Nudge Unit, where she applies behavioral science insights to develop interventions aimed at enhancing clinical quality. In addition to her academic roles, Dai serves as a Senior Editor for Organization Science. Her research primarily focuses on self-control and motivation, employing field experiments and observational data. From an intrapersonal standpoint, she explores how individuals make decisions that balance long-term benefits and short-term gratification, with a particular focus on how fresh starts—moments that psychologically separate people from their past—affect self-control and goal motivation. From an interpersonal angle, she examines how the behaviors and judgments of others influence individual motivation. Her policy-oriented research designs and tests interventions based on behavioral science theories, aiming to understand their broader effects beyond immediate outcomes, including any unintended consequences, long-term impacts, and factors influencing scalability.

Organizer(s)