Nudging Health Workers in Lao PDR: Evidence-based Decision Making

The case focuses on Save the Children’s Center for Utilizing Behavioral Insights for Children (CUBIC), founded in April of 2020 with the goal of utilizing behavioral decision theory insights to design and implement randomized control trials (RCT) and use that evidence for robust decision making. The case presents the design and implementation information as well as the findings from a RCT run by CUBIC in the Philippines. A second scenario--how to get new mothers to breastfeed, and do so for the first 6-8 months of a newborn baby’s life, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos—requires CUBIC to design a RCT. Discussion covers a range of decisions, from sample size and selection to developing theory-based pragmatic interventions, to implementing field experiments and interpreting the findings. The purpose is to gain an understanding of how to (i) design and implement field experiments and use their evidence to make better decisions, (ii) assess the robustness of such experiments and data interpretation before jumping to an expensive implementation decision.

Randomized control trials are increasingly popular as a way to obtain evidence for business decision making. The goal of the case is to provide a platform to discuss the various aspects of designing and implementing RCTs and using the results to make robust evidence-based decisions. The case can be used for courses on market research, data analytics, and evidence-based decision making in MBA or executive MBA programmes, or more broadly in a half-day executive programme on market research, data analytics in RCTs, or causal inference-based decision making.