ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Encouraging the resumption of economic activity after COVID-19: Evidence from a large scale-field experiment in China.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social, mobility and contact networks in shaping health behaviours and infectious disease dynamics: a scoping review.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2025Article
- Descriptive norms can "backfire" in hyper-polarized contexts.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Intolerance of uncertainty and mental health in China "Post-pandemic" age: The mediating role of difficulties in emotion regulation.PloS one · 2024Article
- New observation of perceptive mechanism behind the long-lasting change of people's community mobility: evidence from COVID-19 in China.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- What Affects Perceived Health Risk Attitude During the Pandemic: Evidence From Migration and Dining Behavior in China.International regional science review · 2023Article
- Encouraging the resumption of economic activity after COVID-19: Evidence from a large scale-field experiment in China.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
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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