Nudging Academics to Didactic Training

Abstract

In a field experiment at a German university we tried to nudge academics to participate in didactic training. The treatment group received additional information about the average monetary value of comparable private sector training courses outside of the university's in-house didactic training program.

We cannot find any statistically significant effect of our informational nudge based on nonparametric tests. Due to few participants, logistic regressions yield large confidence intervals that are consistent with no treatment effect as well as a relatively strong positive treatment effect.

Keywords: nudge, field experiment, informational nudge, behavioral economics, decision support

JEL Classification: D10, I20, D83, I2