Evidence-Based Interventions Need To Consider Scale-Up From The Start
Author(s)
- Omar Al-Ubaydli
- John A. List
Full TextAbstract
The A/B testing approach invites promising early results that are unlikely to be realized in a larger setting. We argue that within the social sciences, a fundamentally different approach is needed; we call it option C thinking. Put simply, a twenty-first-century team of civil servants and social scientists should lead with experiments that anticipate likely causes of failure at scale, even if doing so requires more time, effort, and resources initially.