You can "nudge" someone into buying your product, but those tricks fail completely at getting them to actually use it.
March 18, 2026
Original Paper
The Promise and Limits of Nudging under Stigma: Experimental Evidence on Menstrual Cup Adoption and Use in Botswana
SSRN · 6350431
The Takeaway
While common policy tools like 'default options' are highly effective at making people accept a new health product, this study shows they do nothing to solve the social stigma or learning curves associated with actually using the product. This creates a massive 'adoption-usage gap' where people end up owning technologies they are still too socially embarrassed or uncomfortable to use.
From the abstract
Many welfare-improving technologies in low- and middle-income countries exhibit low take-up even when prices and access barriers are minimal. This paper studies this phenomenon in the context of menstrual health in Botswana, a domain characterized by stigma and where reusable menstrual health technologies were virtually unknown. We conduct a randomized survey experiment that independently randomizes persuasive information and default provision of a menstrual cup in a 2×2 design. Defaults substan