Battling bed bugs in South Philly: Lessons from a door-to-door Chagas disease control campaign in Peru

Successful control of bed bugs in dense urban neighborhoods requires coordinated insecticide treatment and other control measures. For optimal elimination, entire blocks of homes should be treated at the same time to prevent rapid reinfestation. Door-to-door public health campaigns have become very rare in the US. In developing-country settings, however, the door-to-door campaign is still an important component of public health interventions. In this randomized controlled pilot study (to be fielded in Spring 2012), we apply insights from a behavioral economic intervention in Arequipa, Peru designed to increase participation in a Chagas disease vector control campaign to a similar effort for bed bug treatment in South Philadelphia. Specifically, we test the impact of two different forms of lottery prizes on household willingness to place and monitor bed bug traps. In the individual lottery intervention, participating households receive a lottery ticket representing a chance to win a large prize (e.g., a tablet). In the group lottery intervention, participating households again receive a lottery ticket, but are only eligible to win a prize if their immediate neighbors also participate. Due to the importance of social norms, we hypothesize that participation will be higher under the group lottery condition. However, due to different social network structures and the role of social norms in the US vs. in Peru, we do not expect the marginal impact of the group lottery (vs. the individual lottery) to be as large in the South Philadelphia bed bug study as in the Chagas study in Peru.