The Impact of Information Disclosure on Consumer Behavior: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment of Calorie Labels on Restaurant Menus

For their financial support, we are grateful to the Institute for the Social Sciences, the Institute for Healthy Futures, the Building Faculty Connections Program, and the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. Cawley thanks the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. For expert research assistance, we thank Katie Loshak, Julie Berman, Jenna Greco, Colin Wellborne, Julia Baker, and Miranda Miller. For their helpful cooperation with the study we thank Chefs Tony Vesco and Bob White, and instructors Chris Gaulke and Heather Kowalski. For helpful comments and feedback, we thank participants at the American Society of Health Economics biennial conference, the Behavioral Economics and Health conference at the University of Pennsylvania and in seminars at the Erasmus School of Economics, University of Hamburg, Harvard, University of Montevideo, UNLV, Princeton, Vanderbilt, and the University of Wisconsin. We also thank, for their helpful comments, Jon Cantor, Bryant Kim, Chad Meyerhoefer, Christina Roberto, and Olga Yakusheva. This experiment was approved by the Cornell IRB, protocol ID # 1509005830. This study is registered in the AEA RCT Registry and the unique identifying number is: AEARCTR-0000940. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.