Nudges for Public Budget Officers: A Field-Based Survey Experiment

This study experimentally investigated the effects of providing information on public policy’s future outcomes and emphasizing the information with behavioral economics nudges on budgetary decision-making in Japan’s local governments. Public budget officers consider the policy’s efficiency and assess its budget amount; however, the adequate performance of their tasks is prevented by time and information constraints, biases, and institutional pressures. We conducted a field-based survey experiment on staff in financial departments of Japan’s local governments and obtained 484 valid responses. In the experiment, respondents assessed a budget amount for the next year for a hypothetical environmental policy, under one of the following four conditions: (A) control group, (B) future outcome information, (C) future outcome information with a loss-framing nudge, and (D) future outcome information with a social-comparison nudge. The experimental results show that the budget officers assigned to the two nudged-based intervention groups evaluated the future outcomes more highly and referred to them more than the control group, and then their assessed amount increased from the past year’s level and was higher than merely providing the future outcomes information. We conclude that the loss-framing and social-comparison nudges changed the budget officers’ decision-making to be more future-oriented.