Nudging Towards Compliance with the Payment of Garbage Collection Fee (Results from a Field Experiment)

Non-compliance with the payment of taxes and fees represents a problem for governments around the world. The experience shows that behavioural interventions provide inexpensive and easy ways of how to partially address this problem. A behavioural experiment was carried out in a municipality of Hlohovec, Slovakia, which focused on increasing the compliance with the payment of garbage collection fee. The intervention was carried out using a social norm and a social deterrence nudge. The results suggest that sending a social norm leaflet had a positive and significant impact on the compliance with the fee payment and decreased the outstanding net debt on the fee. On the opposite, the estimation results suggest that sending a deterrence leaflet had a negative effect on compliance with the garbage collection fee payment and led to an increase of the net outstanding debt on the fee payment, but the relationship was only weakly statistically significant