Nudging Your Way To Commitments

Finally, I got around to reading Nudge, the behavioral economics book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

The book is based on the concept of Libertarian Paternalism, which basically assumes that people frequently make mistakes in their decision making, specially for big and complex decisions, and that providing subtle nudges so people make better choices will help society as a whole.  By using Choice Architecture, or the way information and choices are presented, effectiveness in decision making can be significantly increased:

"A simple example of a nudge would be placing healthy foods in a school cafeteria at eye level, while putting less healthy junk food in harder to reach places. Individuals are not prevented from eating whatever they want, but the arranging of the food choices in that way has the effect of decreasing consumption of junk food and increasing consumption of healthier foods..."

The other  idea I found attractive was a methodology to increasing goal achievement based on nudges and choice architecture, that is being used by an online service called Stikk.    With Stikk, users set a specific goal, a time to achieve them, a way to measure them objectively by a third party, and put down a certain amount of money as a guarantee.  When the deadline comes, if the goal has been achieved, the person gets a refund of his money;  if the goal has not been achieved, the money is donated to charity.  Stikk may help people improve the odds of achieve the goals, even if many times people would do it just to avoid losing their money.  However, I wonder if this system could be used in other domains?

Imagine a 500 million dollar manufacturing company that has made the commitment to implement Lean in all of its manufacturing operations, in less than 3 years, will be measured by standard lean measurements by an auditing party, and guarantees the fulfillment of the goal with 1 million dollars.  If in 3 years the measurements have not been achieved, the company would donate the money to charity!

Utopian?   Maybe.  Can it work?