Elizabeth Linos

Who they are

Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is Faculty Director of The People Lab. Her research applies behavioural science and public management to the work of government. The school's profile groups it into three areas: recruiting, retaining and supporting the government workforce, the interactions between residents and the state, and the use of evidence in policymaking.

Before joining the Harvard faculty she was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Vice President and Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team in North America. She also served as a policy adviser to the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. She holds affiliations with the school's Center for Public Leadership and its Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

Key papers

DellaVigna, S., & Linos, E. (2022). RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence From Two Nudge Units. Econometrica, 90(1), 81-116. doi:10.3982/ECTA18709.

The paper is the one this site cites in its articles on choice architecture. The authors assembled 126 randomised controlled trials covering 23 million people, a set that includes every trial run by two of the largest United States government nudge units. They compared those trials with nudge studies drawn from two recent meta-analyses of academic journal papers.

Key ideas

The paper reports that the average nudge in the academic sample raised take-up by 8.7 percentage points, an increase of 33.4 per cent over the average control group. In the nudge-unit trials the average effect was 1.4 percentage points, an increase of 8.0 per cent. The authors describe the nudge-unit effect as sizable and highly statistically significant, and smaller than the academic one.

They proposed three factors for the difference: the statistical power of the trials, characteristics of the interventions such as topic area and behavioural channel, and selective publication. On their estimate, selective publication in the academic sample, made worse by low statistical power, explains about 70 per cent of the difference in effect sizes, and differences in nudge characteristics explain most of the remainder.

The design of the comparison is the paper's contribution. Because the nudge-unit portfolios contain every trial the units ran, regardless of result, the set carries no file drawer by construction. That feature is what allows the authors to put a figure on the role of selective publication.

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