[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-113278-en":3,"doc-seo-113278-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":91},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},113278,8796095461564,"Liam","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_155a257f0dc6eb9ab79c44ca47cae57d",8,"Research & Report","Keep It Simple - A Field Experiment on Information Sharing among Strangers","SMS information campaigns are increasingly used for policy, and this field experiment studies information sharing through mobile phone messages. Rural households in Mozambique with mobile money access receive an SMS with simple voucher-redeeming instructions, and participants may share the non-rival information with unknown, exogenously assigned peers. Few redeem vouchers, yet many share voucher information, including details they do not personally use. Sharing increases when no receiver information is provided; costly messaging, shame for non-sharing, or allowing value appropriation reduce sharing. The results suggest that keeping messages simple best supports diffusion among strangers.","Pub lic Disclosure Authorized Pub lic Disclosure Authorized  \nThe World Bank Economic Review, 36(4), 2022, 857–888  \n[https://doi.org10.1093/wber/lhac016](https://doi.org10.1093/wber/lhac016)  \nArticle  \nKeep It Simple: A Field Experiment on Information Sharing among Strangers *  \nCátia Batista , Marcel Fafchamps, and Pedro C. Vicente  \nAbstract  \nSMS information campaigns are increasingly used for policy. A field experiment is conducted to study information sharing through mobile phone messages. Subjects are rural households in Mozambique who have access to mobile money. In the baseline intervention, subjects receive an SMS containing simple instructions on how to redeem a voucher for mobile money. They can share this non-rival information with other exogenously assigned subjects unknown to them. Few participants redeem the voucher. They nonetheless share it with others and many share information about the voucher they do not use themselves. The voucher is shared more when no information is provided on the receiver. When partial information is provided, no evidence is found of more sharing with subjects who have similar characteristics. Treatments are introduced to increase the cost of sending a message, shame those who do not send the voucher to others, or allow subjects to appropriate the value of the voucher. All these treatments decrease information sharing. To encourage information diffusion amongstrangers, the best is to “keep it simple.”  \nJEL classification: D83, D64, O33  \nKeywords: SMS information campaign, nudging; mobile money, anonymity, shared identity  \n1. Introduction  \nMany policy interventions rely on messages to convey information to a target audience so as to induce behavioral changes—for example, letters (e.g., Hjort et al. 2021), SMS (e.g., Abebe et al. 2018; J-PAL 2020; Banerjee et al. 2021b; Afzal et al. 2022, mobile phones (e.g., Cole and Fernando 2021; Kelley et al. 2022), and social media (e.g., Alatas et al. 2022) . The use of messages has further increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Alsan et al. 2020) . In many interventions, the policy maker has individual identifiers (e.g., phone numbers) for only a fraction of those they wish to target. Consequently, reaching other interested individuals through information diffusion is often essential for the policy to  \n􀀂 Cátia Batista is Associate Professor of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics, Campus de Carcavelos, Rua da Holanda, N 1, Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal. Her email address is [catia.batista@novasbe.pt. Marcel](catia.batista@novasbe.pt. Marcel) Fafchamps is Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute, Encina Hall, 616 Serra St., Stanford, CA 94305, USA. His email address is [fafchamp@stanford.edu. Pedro C. Vicente](fafchamp@stanford.edu. Pedro C. Vicente) is Professor of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics, Campus de Carcavelos, Rua da Holanda, N 1, Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal. His email address is [pedro.vicente@novasbe.pt. We](pedro.vicente@novasbe.pt. We)[ ](pedro.vicente@novasbe.pt. We)benefited from comments from Yves Zenou, Sanjeev Goyal, Francis Bloch, Markus Goldstein, participants to the Monash University Conference on Social Networks 2018, and from the editor and two anonymous referees. We wish to thank Stefan Leeffers, Timóteo Simone, and the NOVAFRICA office in Mozambique for excellent research assistance. We are particularly grateful to Carteira Móvel/MKesh for institutional support. We wish to acknowledge financial support from the International Growth Centre. All errors are our responsibility.  \n© The Author(s) 2022 . Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK.  \nAll rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [journals.permissions@oup.com](journals.permissions@oup.com)  \nDownloaded from [https://academic.oup.com/wber/article/36/4/857/6711586 by Sectoral Library Rm MC-C3-220 user on](h","cbCaibxgMJANtMQ9","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaibxgMJANtMQ9","pdf",578510,1,32,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## Motivation for message-based policy interventions\n## Costs and trust in information sharing\n## Diffusion models and network-based approaches","[{\"question\":\"What is the field experiment designed to test?\",\"answer\":\"The study examines how information sharing occurs through mobile phone SMS messages, focusing on whether recipients pass along voucher redemption information to unknown peers.\"},{\"question\":\"What happens after participants receive the SMS voucher instructions?\",\"answer\":\"Few participants redeem the voucher, but many still share information about it, including information about the voucher they do not use themselves.\"},{\"question\":\"Which treatments change the amount of information sharing?\",\"answer\":\"Treatments that increase the cost of sending messages, shame people who do not share, or allow subjects to appropriate the voucher value all decrease information 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