Studying effect of gentle nudges on steel crockery theft in lIMB's student mess

Abstract

lIM Bangalore students have the habit of carrying the steel plates and cutlery from the mess back to their rooms. Once done with their meal, they often abandon these items in the hostel blocks, often with food left on the plates. This has understandably burdened the housekeeping staff with extra effort. There is also cutlery shortages and costs incurred to compensate for the missing items. To understand this behavior and to nudge students into behaving better, the following experiment was designed. The first treatment condition relied on giving students updated information about the number of missing cutlery items. This was based on the premise that if people are given accurate and up to date information, they make better decisions. The second treatment condition combined information with a peer scrutiny component, where the number of abandoned items found from each hostel block was listed. The block with the highest number was highlighted on a white board as the day's defaulter. After three weeks, the results suggest that both treatments have significantly reduced the number of plates and other items left abandoned in hostel blocks. The impact of each treatment is significantly improved over the control group (without any nudge). However, the results are less optimistic when it comes to utensils and plates that went missing from the mess. More items went missing during the second half of the experiment relative to control. The present study hypothesizes a few possible reasons for this trend. One prospective idea is that treatment 2 was conducted immediately after placements week, when food was delivered to student rooms. It is likely that students didn't break out of the habit of eating in their rooms in the subsequent week. However, this is conjecture and not empirically proven in this study. Nudges must be carefully designed and considered before being implemented in studies of this nature. This experiment can be further improved by running each treatment for a longer duration- this study did it for one week. Furthermore, a better window of time could have been chosen when no major events were ongoing in the campus. If it is possible to track period before an item is returned to the mess, it will provide more granularity to the analysis. This kind of data is not possible to track today. Lastly, it is crucial for nudges to play on competitiveness of MBA students and utilize the peer scrutiny and gamification component of treatment 2 to induce better behavior.