Using Incentives to Encourage Healthy Eating in Children

There is growing interest in the situations in which incentives have a significant effect on positive behaviors, particularly in children. Using a randomized field experiment, we find that incentives increase the fraction of children eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch by 80 percent and reduce the amount of waste by 33 percent. At schools with a larger fraction of low-income children, the increase in the fraction of children...