Nudging students by means of information; reminders and social norms
Final assignment Behavioral Economics
Tessa Kimmel 10666214

Introduction
At university students experience a lot of freedom as the majority of classes is facultative. This means students have a choice to attend the class or not. But people, and thus students as well, sometimes fail to do a good job at making choices because of self-control problems (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003). For example; they invest too little effort in their education because they value present consumption more than future consumption, have time- inconsistent preferences or underestimate the return on education (Gneezy et al., 2011). As some students tend to procrastinate studying and skip classes, some kind of paternalism might be helpful to reduce this behavior. (Libertarian) paternalism is a way to steer people’s choices in directions that will promote their welfare, but at the same time preserving freedom of choice (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003). This can be done by creating a choice architecture which is an environment consisting of specific features which influences the choice of people in some direction (Thaler et al., 2010). These features could be defaults, expecting error, mappings, feedback, structuring complex choices and creating incentives (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003). Here the focus will lie on a constructed choice architecture by means of information provision to students through reminders and on social norms. Firstly, I will discuss a randomized field experiment on nudging with information by Calzolari and Nardotto (2012) in which they find that providing information in the form of reminders induce users of a gym to increase their attendance. Secondly, the work of Dolan and Metcalfe (2013) where they find that providing information on social norms can change energy behavior will be critically evaluated. Based