A research team recently compared the effectiveness of nudge-type strategies with more standard policy interventions, calculating the ratio between an intervention’s causal effect and its implementation cost. The results showed that in each of the domains that the researchers examined, nudges were highly cost effective, often more so than the traditional policy interventions.
I was truly surprised to see that the cost effectiveness of nudging is often 100, and even 1,000, times greater than more traditional interventions
… says co-author Shlomo Benartzi, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.