Abstract: 

How can lab experiments help in the ex-ante evaluation of public policies? Focusing on nutrition and drawing from five experiments from different papers, this talk shows two distinct paths: focusing on cognitive processes and building counterfactual situations.
The first path focuses on the micro and psychological effect of food labeling, showing how numericor color-coded labels interact with cognitive and time constraints in controlled environments. Results show that color-coded information,while more coarse and less informative, is integrated faster indecisions and for cognitively constrained consumers can generate better decisions also in the long run.
The second path tries to assess the macro and economic impact of labeling and price changes in a controlled setting, focusing on the impact on the nutritional value and economic cost of food shopping of introducing different types of labels and price policies. Color-coded labels that aggregate information have significantly larger impacts than analytic, numeric labels; labels are more effective than pricing and the combination of price and information signals is sub-additive. By means of amacrosimulation coupling experimental, survey and epidemiological data, we can further estimate the impact on overall mortality of adopting different nutritional labels.