"Nudges in "Equilibrium

With the transformation of communications technology, health promotion activities via mass media and SMS have become cheap and therefore widespread. Many of these programs have been evaluated individually, and many have been shown to be both effective and cost-effective. But there is scant research on how all of these programs interact with one another. In particular, existing literature suggests that there are general mechanisms that might cause programs to interfere with one another: people might infer the quality of health behaviors based on whether or not they get promoted, or they might find it costly to attend to several behaviors or to the information promoting them all at once. This project proposes an experiment in which individuals are randomly reminded or incentivized to engage in one healthy behavior, two healthy behaviors, or nothing at all. The experiment design will allow me to determine whether these general mechanisms do indeed cause interference between programs, and if so, which mechanisms are most important. Understanding these effects would enable policy makers to coordinate programs more effectively.