Encouraging the resumption of economic activity after COVID-19: Evidence from a large scale-field experiment in China
Name
e2100719119.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.04 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d26d161ff404299277b663da8babfd4d
Author(s)
Palacios, Juan
Fan, Yichun
Yoeli, Erez
Wang, Jianghao
Chai, Yuchen
Sun, Weizeng
Rand, David G
Zheng, Siqi
Date Issued
February 1, 2022
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Juan Palacios, Yichun Fan, Erez Yoeli, Jianghao Wang, Yuchen Chai, Weizeng Sun, David G. Rand, Siqi Zheng, Encouraging the resumption of economic activity after COVID-19: Evidence from a large scale-field experiment in China, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Feb 2022, 119 (5) e2100719119
Version
Final published version
Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, governments find themselves facing a new challenge: motivating citizens to resume economic activity. What is an effective way to do so? We investigate this question using a field experiment in the city of Zhengzhou, China, immediately following the end of the city’s COVID-19 lockdown. We assessed the effect of a descriptive norms intervention providing information about the proportion of participants’ neighbors who have resumed economic activity. We find that informing individuals about their neighbors’ plans to visit restaurants increases the fraction of participants visiting restaurants by 12 percentage points (37%), among those participants who underestimated the proportion of neighbors who resumed economic activity. Those who overestimated did not respond by reducing restaurant attendance (the intervention yielded no “boomerang” effect); thus, our descriptive norms intervention yielded a net positive effect. We explore the moderating role of risk preferences and the effect of the intervention on subjects’ perceived risk of going to restaurants, as well as the contrast with an intervention for parks, which were already perceived as safe. All of these analyses suggest our intervention worked by reducing the perceived risk of going to restaurants.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Real Estate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100719119
