Xavier Dreze

Who they are

This site draws on the 2006 paper only.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

The endowed progress effect: how artificial advancement increases effort (2006), Nunes and Drèze. In the field study at the heart of the paper, car wash customers who received a ten-stamp card with two stamps already filled completed it more often, about 34 per cent, than customers with a blank eight-stamp card, about 19 per cent, although both had eight washes to go. The abstract reports that the effect is driven by perceived task completion rather than reluctance to waste credit, and that it depends on the reason given for the head start and on the currency of progress.

Key ideas

The central idea is that people judge a goal by how far along they feel. A head start that changes nothing about the work left can still change behaviour. The result is a single field experiment of modest size, not yet repeated in a registered replication, and later studies have found conditions under which given progress helps less.

---