{In-Person Event}

Speaker: Leonhard Lades

Title: Who suffers from sludge?

Abstract: 

“Sludge” is one of the most important, and underappreciated, problems in modern society. Sludge describes frictions such as administrative burdens that prevent people from carrying out what is in their own best interests. Examples of sludge include unnecessarily complex paperwork requirements, difficulties in cancelling membership fees, and excessive or unexplained waiting times. Sludge is pervasive in public and private settings, impacting policy take-up, efficient service delivery, and user experience. It is often claimed that sludge has distributional consequences as vulnerable groups are particularly susceptible to sludge. This paper test this claim. The paper presents data from a nationally representative survey with 1776 participants living in Ireland and shows that self-reported vulnerability to sludge is not associated with demographics. Psychological variables, such as administrative literacy and the tendency to procrastinate, as well as self-reported time scarcity and cognitive scarcity, are significantly associated with vulnerability to sludge. The association between mental health and vulnerability to sludge is surprisingly not significant.