Prospective borrowers must complete a lengthy online application to be considered for a loan. Many of them begin the application but don’t finish it. Kiva enlisted the Common Cents Lab, a behavioral research laboratory, to come up with a solution.
Their suggestion: Impose an ending. Give people a specific deadline a few weeks away for completing the application. On one level, this idea seems idiotic. A deadline surely means that some people won’t finish the application in time and therefore will be disqualified for the loan. But Kiva found that when it sent applicants a reminder message with a deadline, compared with a reminder message without a deadline, 24 percent more borrowers completed the application.” Likewise, in other studies, people given a hard deadline—-a date and time—are more likely to sign up to be organ donors than those for whom the choice is open-ended.
Excerpt from: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink
