In the 1990s, day care centers had a problem. The kids weren’t being picked up on time, causing lots of disruptions for both the staff and the children.
Around this time, I was dating someone who worked at a day care center, and she told me all about this problem.
Teachers had to stay back with waiting children, which meant they had to work longer, and waiting anxiously with a child could be emotionally taxing. Children had their evening schedules messed up, and it seems likely that some of these kids would form a negative opinion of day care.
Day care businesses lost a lot of money, too. The extra time staff spent due to late arrivals could have been used for other activities that generated revenue.
In summary, this was a well-known mess in the day care industry all over the developed world. That’s when two economists stepped in to run an experiment.
Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini decided to run a study across several different day care centers in Haifa, Israel. They set up a small fin…
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