[Ed. Note: On Friday, May 2 and Saturday, May 3, 2014, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted its 2014 annual conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” This is an installment in our series of live blog posts from the event; video will be available later in the summer on our website.]
This panel, moderated by Dr. Neel Shah concerned motivational crowding out.
The first paper, presented by Aditi Sen, was a paper co-authored with Huffman, Lowenstein, Asch, Kullgren, and Volp. The paper examined motivational crowding out from incentive payments in the weight loss context. They measured motivation via a survey administered before and after the introduction of financial incentives in two weight loss field experiments and found no evidence that intrinsic motivation fell when participants were given financial incentives as compared to controls.
The second paper, by Kristen Underhill, went deep into the theory of motivational crowding out. The article reviews the existing literature and shows how sloppily the notion of crowding out is used. She offers 9 different dynamics of crowding out and discusses which have been validated when. She then offers a framework for thinking about when regulatory interventions are justified focused on autonomoy, behavioral outcomes, and the principal and beneficiary of the incentive scheme. The goal of the project was to offer “incentive architecture” techniques for regulators and guidance as to when they are appropriate.
The audience questions include: in what contexts do crowding out occur or not and how woudl we predict? Tax incentives as an example of the relevant incentives? Does motivational crowding out varies with SES? Do the empirical results apply more to moralized behavior like smoking and weight loss than others, and other topics?