title: The behavioralist as nutritionist: leveraging behavioral economics to improve child food choice and consumption.
abstract: We leverage behavioral economics to explore new approaches to tackling child food choice and consumption. Using a field experiment with >1500 children, we report several key insights. We find that incentives have large influences: in the control, 17% of children prefer the healthy snack, whereas introduction of small incentives increases take-up of the healthy snack to ∼75%. There is some evidence that the effects continue post-treatment, consistent with a model of habit formation. We find little evidence that the framing of incentives (loss vs. gain) matters. Educational messaging alone has little effect, but we observe a combined effect of messaging and incentives: together they provide an important influence on food choice.
authors.affiliation: University of Chicago and NBER, United States.
authors.forename: John A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: List
authors.affiliation: University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States. Electronic address: anyasamek@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Anya Savikhin
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Samek
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology; D060909:Economics, Behavioral; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D005518:Food Preferences / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D009042:Motivation; D012572:School Health Services; D062410:Snacks / Q000523:psychology
keywords: Child behavior; Educational messages; Field experiment; Food choice; Incentives