Helping government workers ask for organ donor registration, by House, Lacetera, Macis, and Mazar

 Market designers can operate at every level of detail. Here's an experiment on promoting organ donor registration:

Nudging the Nudger: A Field Experiment on the Effect of Performance Feedback to Service Agents on Increasing Organ Donor Registrations by Julian House, Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis & Nina Mazar, NBER WORKING PAPER 30547, DOI 10.3386/w30547, October 2022

Abstract: We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates. Despite having no tie to remuneration or promotion, the provision of individual performance feedback three times over one year resulted in a 25% increase in daily signups, compared to otherwise similar encouragement and reminders. Adding benchmark information that compared CSRs performance to average and top peer performance did not further enhance this effect. Registrations increased more among CSRs whose performance was already above average, and there was no negative effect on lower-performing CSRs. A post-intervention survey showed that CSRs found the information included in the treatments helpful and encouraging. However, performance feedback without benchmark information increased perceived pressure to perform.

"We collaborated with ServiceOntario, an agency of the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services. The agency provides a single point of contact for most government services in the province (e.g., driver and vehicle licensing, license plate stickers, public health insurance registration, and business licensing). Most of the organ registrations in Ontario (pre-Covid-19 pandemic: 85%, Trillium Gift of Life Network, 2017) have occurred with customers visiting ServiceOntario centers in person.3 Because of their unique role, ServiceOntario customer-service representatives (CSRs) are ideally positioned to promote organ donor registrations when interacting with citizens. Indeed, operational policy instructs them to implement a prompted-choice procedure with all customers. "