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How can a letter increase sewer bill payments?
As more residents and businesses fail to pay their sewer bills, cities across the United States have had to resort to turning off water services to prompt them to pay. In some cities, sewer charges are included on the water bill and collected by the utility company. This makes it easy for cities to collect […]
May 3, 2016
How can a letter encourage us to pay our parking fines?
Like death and taxes, parking tickets are a fact of life – especially in urban areas. While no driver likes seeing that slip of paper tucked under their windshield wiper, parking tickets serve important functions – like keeping busy roadways free of impediments and making parking fair to all drivers. The problem is, many drivers […]
March 4, 2016
How can text messages encourage people to see a doctor?
If you haven’t seen a doctor in a long time, the thought of picking up the phone to schedule an appointment can be terrifying. Sometimes it’s easier to adopt an “out of sight out of mind” mentality. However, the people who haven’t seen a doctor in years are the ones most likely to benefit from […]
February 22, 2016
Stories from the States
As part of BIT North America’s work with the Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities initiative, we have launched ten randomized control trials in six cities from Kentucky to California in the last six months. While we wait for the results, we thought we’d share three stories that shed some light on BIT’s methodology and let […]
February 4, 2016
Happy holidays to our stateside cousins – Inside the Nudge Unit is available in the USA!
We’ve known for some time that across countries labour productivity per hour is negatively correlated with hours worked. Just to check, we ran a seasonally festive correlation between labour productivity and average days of holiday taken by country, which also showed a modest negative correlation (about -0.12 in the data we had to hand…). It seems, […]
December 22, 2015
BIT to partner with US cities through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities Initiative
New partnership will help to launch US operations for BIT The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has entered into a three-year partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies on its new What Works Cities initiative. The $42 million project endeavors to build on existing innovation at the city-level by helping mayors and local leaders use data and evidence to […]
April 20, 2015
Harvard conference
On the 21 and 22 October, Harvard’s Behavioural Insights Group hosted a two day conference on “Lessons from the front lines of global policy”. The event, which was funded through the joint BIT/BIG Sloan Foundation grant, featured talks from leading Harvard Academics and practitioners from around the world. Highlights of the conference included: Professor Michael […]
October 30, 2014
Press release: new $1m partnership between the Behavioural Insights Team and Harvard
Press release: new $1m partnership between the Behavioural Insights Team and Harvard A new partnership has been established by the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in the UK and the Behavioural Insights Group (BIG) at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The partnership is supported by a grant from the Sloan […]
August 7, 2014
Partners in Washington to build on BIT work
Over the past week or two there has been lots of coverage of a new team in the White House that will look to apply lessons from behavioural sciene to public policy. The US team will be headed by Maya Shankar, who met members of BIT in Washington to discuss how we will exchange ideas and share research – a […]
August 8, 2013
Ideas and results from Harvard, part II
In this post, we share our discussions at Harvard that we list under the second word in the simple mnemonic, EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely). EAST is the framework the Behavioural Insights Team uses to apply insights from behavioural science to public policy making. A is for ATTRACTIVE Curiosity can be a powerful motive. Leslie […]
December 3, 2012