In Oklahoma, about 39,000 households receive government subsidies to pay for child care. Surprisingly, about two-thirds don't renew their benefits on time. It creates added work for everyone -- from the caseworker, who has to re-interview and reverify the parents' eligibility, to the child care provider, who can experience an interruption in payment.

So a couple of years ago, the Oklahoma Department of Human Services decided to do something about it. They partnered with MDRC, a social policy research organization and a federal contractor, to try three "nudge" experiments, or small interventions that can encourage people to make better decisions. For the past six years, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has funded several projects in seven states to apply the principles of behavioral economics in welfare programs. Now, Oklahoma was applying it to child care subsidies.....

.....Modest impacts appear to be the norm among the series of nudge interventions funded by the ACF. The first to report results was a project involving incarcerated parents in Texas who could avoid mounting debt by opting out of child support payments while in prison; an intervention resulted in an increase of 11 percentage points in those opting out, but the majority of eligible prisoners (about 61 percent) still did not participate. With the Oklahoma child care subsidy experiment, the 3-percentage-point increase "wasn't earth shattering," said Alexander Mayer, a researcher with MDRC, "but the real advantage to these interventions is that they're low cost and scalable."

Indeed, the results have been positive enough that the ACF announced last September it was contracting with MDRC for five more years of behavioral interventions in human services. That's in addition to $4 million the agency awarded in 2014 to seven states and the District of Columbia for pilot projects that use behavioral economics at state child support agencies.

And the Obama administration isn't the only funder interested in nudge experiments to help the public sector. Last year, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a separate initiative called What Works Cities, which focuses on data-driven performance management and pays for technical assistance from the Behavioral Insights Team, another firm that specializes in applied behavioral economics.....

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