Behavioural Insights (BI) Practitioners-in-training in UBC’s Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights complete a capstone project to apply their developing BI knowledge and skills to real-world problems. Our inaugural cohort of BI Practitioners worked in teams to complete an amazing eight randomized controlled trials! As teams turn these projects into working papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, we’ll be posting them to the BI wiki at https://blogs.ubc.ca/biwiki/bi-at-ubc/. Our first featured project is:
See the Sign, Avoid the Fine:
TSZ Parking Signs in Vancouver
Parinda Chagani, Eva Lai, & Carl Jensen
(Advisor: David Hardisty)
This project aimed to improve compliance with temporary parking restrictions in the City of Vancouver. New “Behavioural Insights informed” parking signs incorporated salience and loss aversion. Control and BI-informed signs were compared in a randomized controlled trial. The BI-informed signs reduced parking violations by 57%. Although this difference was not statistically significant, it may be managerially significant. The project team recommended extending the trial to collect more data, trialing BI-informed signs for other types of parking zones, and conducting a cost-benefit analysis to inform scaling decisions.
Keywords: behavioural insights, nudge, salience, loss aversion, compliance, signage, parking
[ Working Paper PDF | Conference Poster ]