Researchers

Marcella Alsan, Abhijit Banerjee, Emily Breza, Arun Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, Ben Olken, Abhijit Chowdhury, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham 

Abstract

Ex-ante, it is unclear which types of health-related messages will be effective in swaying beliefs and changing behavior given the unprecedented nature of COVID-19. In partnership with the government of West Bengal, this project tests the effect of providing health-related information on health-preserving behavior, such as social distancing and hygiene practices. The study is rapidly testing several different kinds of health messages recorded by celebrities and feeding the results to the government in near real-time. The most effective broadcast strategies will be adopted to rapidly deploy a large-scale messaging campaign targeted at poor and rural communities. Given the ethics and urgency, the proposed project will also build an epidemiological model to optimally target over a thousand villages and use ethically adaptive experimentation, which aims to minimize the exposure of participants to less effective interventions. The project’s data collection methods and ethically adaptive experimentation techniques will allow the team to share actionable information to the government in real time and direct resources to the most effective messaging campaigns.

Project Outcomes of Interest

Social distancing, hygiene practices, health-seeking behavior

Partners

Government of West Bengal, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

Impact Goals

Implementing Organization

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

Results Status

No Results Yet