Enhancing the adoption of digital public services: Evidence from a large-scale field experiment

Governments increasingly digitalize the provision of their public services, but these efforts fail to generate expected social benefits if the services remain underutilized. We use a large-scale field experiment to provide causal evidence on how a concrete policy instrument, nudging, can be used to address such underutilization by a group of slow adopters. Our experiment is conducted in a real-world setting with actual citizens and makes use of informative and social influence nudges. We find that such behavioral interventions enhance the adoption of an online government service among the slow adopters. The effects are statistically highly significant and quantitatively large. The most effective experimental treatment doubles the adoption rate. •Reports results from a large-scale (N = 40,000) randomized experiment.•Subjects in the study are actual citizens, slow adopters.•Studies causal effects of informative and social norm nudges on adoption of public online service.•Shows that the largest treatment effect doubles the rate of adoption.•Complements the empirical e-government studies that are based on observational data.