{"title":"Asking for a friend: Reminders and incentives for crowdfunding college savings","authors":"Jason Jabbari, Stephen Roll, Laura Brugger","doi":"10.1016/j.socec.2024.102305","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Given the importance of college savings and the novel technologies that make gifting more accessible, new programs have been developed to increase college savings contributions among families and friends. Backer, an online college-savings platform that allows 529 account holders to \"crowdfund'' their child's education by inviting a team of contributors, is one of the first and largest organizations to facilitate such contributions among families and friends. We conducted a field experiment to examine the impact of a suite of interventions aimed at increasing both parent contributions through visual reminders and the contributions of family members and friends through account incentives. We find that visual reminders significantly increased the amount of contributors and the frequency of contributions. We find similar effects for a combination of visual reminders and relatively large recruitment incentives. This pattern of results indicates that it is likely the reminder component of the interventions, rather than the incentives themselves, that drove the improvements in study outcomes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51637,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804324001423","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Given the importance of college savings and the novel technologies that make gifting more accessible, new programs have been developed to increase college savings contributions among families and friends. Backer, an online college-savings platform that allows 529 account holders to "crowdfund'' their child's education by inviting a team of contributors, is one of the first and largest organizations to facilitate such contributions among families and friends. We conducted a field experiment to examine the impact of a suite of interventions aimed at increasing both parent contributions through visual reminders and the contributions of family members and friends through account incentives. We find that visual reminders significantly increased the amount of contributors and the frequency of contributions. We find similar effects for a combination of visual reminders and relatively large recruitment incentives. This pattern of results indicates that it is likely the reminder component of the interventions, rather than the incentives themselves, that drove the improvements in study outcomes.
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.
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