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The behavioralist goes to school: leveraging behavioral economics to improve educational performance
Levitt, Steven D.
;
List, John A.
;
Neckermann, Susanne
;
Sadoff, Sally
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URL:
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https://ub-madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/32335
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URN:
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urn:nbn:de:bsz:180-madoc-323358
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Document Type:
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Working paper
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Year of publication:
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2012
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The title of a journal, publication series:
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ZEW Discussion Papers
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Volume:
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12-038
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Place of publication:
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Mannheim
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Publication language:
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English
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Institution:
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Sonstige Einrichtungen > Zentrum für Europ. Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW)
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MADOC publication series:
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Veröffentlichungen des ZEW (Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung) > ZEW Discussion Papers
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Subject:
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330 Economics
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Abstract:
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Decades of research on behavioral economics have established the importance of
factors that are typically absent from the standard economic framework: reference
dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial
rewards. To date, these insights have had little impact on the way the educational
system operates. Through a series of field experiments involving thousands of primary
and secondary school students, we demonstrate the power of behavioral economics to
in
uence educational performance. Several insights emerge. First, we find that incentives framed as losses have more robust effects than comparable incentives framed as
gains. Second, we find that non-financial incentives are considerably more cost-effective
than financial incentives for younger students, but were not effective with older stu-
dents. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consistent with hyperbolic discounting,
all motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a
delay. Since the rewards to educational investment virtually always come with a delay,
our results suggest that the current set of incentives may lead to underinvestment. For
policymakers, our findings imply that in the absence of immediate incentives, many
students put forth low effort on standardized tests, which may create biases in measures
of student ability, teacher value added, school quality, and achievement gaps.
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