A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 191 citations

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Medicine

Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested increased pharmacy vaccination rates by an average of 2.0 percentage points, or 6.8%, over a 3-mo follow-up period. The most-effective messages reminded patients that a flu shot was waiting for them and delivered reminders on multiple days. The top-performing intervention included two texts delivered 3 d apart and communicated to patients that a vaccine was "waiting for you." Neither experts nor lay people anticipated that this would be the best-performing treatment, underscoring the value of simultaneously testing many different nudges in a highly powered megastudy.

Measuring the Completeness of Economic Models

Journal of Political Economy · 2021 · 51 citations

• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Econometrics

Economic models are evaluated by testing the correctness of their predictions. We suggest an additional measure, “completeness”: the fraction of the predictable variation in the data that the model captures. We calculate the completeness of prominent models in three problems from experimental economics: assigning certainty equivalents to lotteries, predicting initial play in games, and predicting human generation of random sequences. The completeness measure reveals new insights about these models, including how much room there is for improving their predictions.

Integrating explanation and prediction in computational social science

Nature · 2021 · 357 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Data science

Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science

Nature · 2021 · 254 citations

• Psychology
• Applied psychology
• Medicine