Do honesty-nudges really work? A large-scale field experiment in an insurance context

Businesses want their customers to self-report information honestly. One increasingly popular way to stimulate desired behavior is by using nudge interventions. But can customers be nudged to self-report information more honestly? This is currently a debate in the literature, where empirical results are inconclusive. Building on related literature on nudges, we add to this debate with a controlled field experiment (N = 5704). We used data from actual customers making real decisions when they file claims online to a large Nordic insurance provider. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the effects of honesty-nudges on self-reported information when filing insurance claims using a controlled field experiment. We designed and tested three honesty-nudges on insurance customers: (1) signing-at-the-beginning, (2) a descriptive social norm message, and (3) a solidarity message. Across five outcome measures, we found that the honesty-nudges, standalone or in any possible combination, do not have significant effects in reducing indicators of insurance claims fraud. But interestingly, customers in all treatment groups used significantly more characters to describe losses than customers in the control group. Also, in post hoc analyses, we found signs that the direction of nudge effects varies across customers' age and customer loyalty.