TY - JOUR
T1 - Enhancing the adoption of digital public services
T2 - Evidence from a large-scale field experiment
AU - Hyytinen, Ari
AU - Tuimala, Jarno
AU - Hammar, Markus
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Heikki Karjaluoto, Topi Miettinen and seminar participants at the VATT Institute for Economic Research and Helsinki GSE for their insightful comments. This paper has been reviewed by the Finnish Tax Administration in order to ensure that it complies with the tax administration's data confidentiality rules.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
PY - 2022/3/5
Y1 - 2022/3/5
N2 - Governments increasingly digitalize the provision of their public services, but these efforts fail to generate expected social benefits if the services remain underutilized. We use a large-scale field experiment to provide causal evidence on how a concrete policy instrument, nudging, can be used to address such underutilization by a group of slow adopters. Our experiment is conducted in a real-world setting with actual citizens and makes use of informative and social influence nudges. We find that such behavioral interventions enhance the adoption of an online government service among the slow adopters. The effects are statistically highly significant and quantitatively large. The most effective experimental treatment doubles the adoption rate.
AB - Governments increasingly digitalize the provision of their public services, but these efforts fail to generate expected social benefits if the services remain underutilized. We use a large-scale field experiment to provide causal evidence on how a concrete policy instrument, nudging, can be used to address such underutilization by a group of slow adopters. Our experiment is conducted in a real-world setting with actual citizens and makes use of informative and social influence nudges. We find that such behavioral interventions enhance the adoption of an online government service among the slow adopters. The effects are statistically highly significant and quantitatively large. The most effective experimental treatment doubles the adoption rate.
KW - 512 Business and Management
KW - field experiment
KW - citizen heterogeneity
KW - e-government
KW - adoption
KW - initial usage
KW - uncertainty
KW - causal inference
KW - nudges
KW - behavioral economics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125693043&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/2b337b6d-0ede-3d2e-9834-ef08b3c2b326/
U2 - 10.1016/j.giq.2022.101687
DO - 10.1016/j.giq.2022.101687
M3 - Article
SN - 0740-624X
VL - 39
JO - Government Information Quarterly
JF - Government Information Quarterly
IS - 3
M1 - 101687
ER -
