The Voice of the Emperor and Personalized Messages during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Last registered on April 27, 2020

View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

The Voice of the Emperor and Personalized Messages during the COVID-19 Pandemic

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0005772

Initial registration date

April 27, 2020

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

April 27, 2020, 11:34 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated

April 27, 2020, 10:53 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country

Japan

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Shuhei Kitamura

Affiliation

Osaka University

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Katsunori Yamada

PI Affiliation

Kindai University

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2020-04-17

End date

2020-05-04

Keywords

Governance, Welfare

Additional Keywords

Information provisions, personalized messages, the Voice of the Emperor, COVID-19, self-restraint behavior

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened many human lives and economic activities in the world. Governments worldwide took several measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus including law-, military-, and/or technology-enforced lock-downs. However, not all the governments immediately took such ``hard" measures, but some, such as Sweden and Japan, took ``soft" measures, e.g., providing political messages to citizens so that they take self-restraint actions on their own.

Despite the flood of administrative messages asking for self-restraint of leaving home, and the emergency declaration by the government on April the 7th, since there are no practical fines against the violations, there are some people who would not comply. This situation has become a social issue and has revealed how difficult it is for a government to guide citizens by providing advisory messages even though the whole society obviously benefits in the long run by following them.

With this circumstance in Japan, this study conducts a Randomized Controlled Trial experiment to investigate causal effects of information provisions to individuals on their self-restraint behaviors with consideration of two novel features in our messages. The first feature we test is the power of the Royals over the political authority. The second one to be examined is the power of personalized messages over commonly shared slogans. We will test if those new features could enhance self-restraint behaviors among Japanese citizens.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Kitamura, Shuhei and Katsunori Yamada. 2020. "The Voice of the Emperor and Personalized Messages during the COVID-19 Pandemic." AEA RCT Registry. April 27. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.5772-1.1

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

We conduct randomized information manipulations, exploiting a 2-by-2 factorial design. It is a three week online panel survey for around 3,500 subjects in Japan.

Intervention Start Date

2020-04-23

Intervention End Date

2020-04-24

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

1. hours of outings
2. hours of outings for unnecessary purposes

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Intentions of outings

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

We conduct randomized information manipulations, exploiting a 2-by-2 factorial design.

First, we have two conditions regarding the sender of the messages on self-restraint behaviors. Specifically, we consider the political authority (the current prime minister) and the current Emperor as the ones who send messages. Since there is already a flood of administrative messages on staying home at the time of the experiment, we consider the condition of the political authority to be our control group. In Japan, the Imperial Family is well-respected and is supposed to be the ``symbol" of Japan. As such, even without any political power with him, the Emperor can influence the society with his messages. Therefore, we will treat this condition as our treatment, and test the symbolic power of the Royals.

In both cases, the senders of messages hope that the society will overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. For the sake of the salience of the experiment, we choose actual statements made by either sender before our experiment set off, rather than we make up fictional messages. Those messages come with drawing images of the senders in order to enhance the reality of the messages.

Next, we have two conditions regarding personalized messages. If participants are in ``NO" condition, they will receive some common information for everybody, just as it is happening in the real world. Instead, if participants are in ``Yes" condition, they will receive personalized messages. Those personalized messages contain information of their own hours of outings from the previous week, together with the median value of outing hours for the rest of participants. As such, from the messages it is easy for our participants to grasp where they stand in the distributions of outing hours. The aim of our personalized massages is to make the information in the society more salient to individuals, thereby promoting responsible behaviors on their own.

Experimental Design Details

Randomization Method

Randomization done in office by a computer

Randomization Unit

Individual

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

3,500 individuals

Sample size: planned number of observations

3,500 individuals

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

875 individuals per arm

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

When the group size is 875, power is 0.8, and the false discovery rate is 0.05, the minimum detectable effect between a pair of groups is 0.1897 standard deviations.

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB