Encouraging the resumption of economic activity after COVID-19 Evidence from a large scale-field experiment in China

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, governments find themselves facing a new challenge: motivating citizens to resume economic activity. What is an effective way to do so? We investigate this question using a field experiment in the city of Zhengzhou, China, immediately following the end of th...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 119; no. 5; pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors Palacios, Juan, Fan, Yichun, Yoeli, Erez, Wang, Jianghao, Chai, Yuchen, Sun, Weizeng, Rand, David G., Zheng, Siqi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 01.02.2022
Subjects
China - epidemiology
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - economics
COVID-19 - epidemiology
COVID-19 - prevention & control
COVID-19 - psychology
Economic activity
Economic conditions
Economics
Humans
Intervention
Motivation
Norms
Pandemics
Parks, Recreational
Perception
Restaurants
Risk perception
SARS-CoV-2
Social Norms
Social Sciences
China
COVID-19
voluntary economic resumption
field experiment
descriptive norms
policy
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Summary:As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, governments find themselves facing a new challenge: motivating citizens to resume economic activity. What is an effective way to do so? We investigate this question using a field experiment in the city of Zhengzhou, China, immediately following the end of the city’s COVID-19 lockdown. We assessed the effect of a descriptive norms intervention providing information about the proportion of participants’ neighbors who have resumed economic activity. We find that informing individuals about their neighbors’ plans to visit restaurants increases the fraction of participants visiting restaurants by 12 percentage points (37%), among those participants who underestimated the proportion of neighbors who resumed economic activity. Those who overestimated did not respond by reducing restaurant attendance (the intervention yielded no “boomerang” effect); thus, our descriptive norms intervention yielded a net positive effect. We explore the moderating role of risk preferences and the effect of the intervention on subjects’ perceived risk of going to restaurants, as well as the contrast with an intervention for parks, which were already perceived as safe. All of these analyses suggest our intervention worked by reducing the perceived risk of going to restaurants.
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Edited by Elke Weber, Departments of Psychology & Public Affairs, Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; received January 13, 2021; accepted November 16, 2021
Author contributions: J.P., Y.F., E.Y., and S.Z. designed research; J.P., Y.F., E.Y., J.W., Y.C., and W.S. performed research; J.P. and Y.F. analyzed data; J.P., E.Y., D.G.R., and S.Z. wrote the paper; J.W. and Y.C. designed the smartphone app for study; and Y.F., Y.C., and W.S. designed the sample recruitment.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2100719119