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IZA Discussion Paper No. 18273
November 2025
Designing Effective Interventions

We provide a systematic framework to diagnose underlying problems and predict intervention effectiveness ex-ante. For this, we developed a parsimonious and generalizable survey tool (anamnesis). Our anamnesis classifies underlying problems along three fundamental diagnoses: awareness, intention, and implementation problems. We validate the framework in an online experiment with 7,500 subjects. We find that (i) intervention effectiveness is heterogeneous across different settings, and (ii) our diagnosis accurately predicts this heterogeneity. On average, predicting a 10%-effect corresponds to an actual effectiveness of 8.92%. We further demonstrate the applicability of our framework to predict heterogeneities in the setting of COVID booster take-up.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

About IZA@LISER Network
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