Abstract: This study evaluates whether low-cost information interventions can improve the timeliness of police investigations in a high-discretion hierarchical government setting. Using a difference-in-differences design, we study mobile-phone messages delivered to investigating officers across districts, emphasizing either the societal value of timely justice for citizens (prosocial framing) or the procedural consequences of delay (punitive framing). Both interventions reduced the time from First Information Report (FIR) registration to chargesheet filing: prosocial messages shortened investigation duration by 2.6 days, while punitive messages reduced it by 5.1 days. Heterogeneity analyses show that these effects are concentrated in urban police stations and vary by officer rank. For crimes against women and children, only punitive messages significantly accelerate chargesheet filing. Alert-timing analyses suggest that prosocial messages can generate short-run accelerations around salient case deadlines, while punitive effects appear less concentrated at specific thresholds. These findings show that subtle, scalable information interventions can improve complex government organization performance and that their effectiveness depends on the motivational logics they activate within specific organizational contexts.

Bio: Vivek is an Assistant Professor in ITOM at Nanyang Business School, Singapore. He studies behavioral operations problems, with research spanning last-mile delivery, health tech, and insurtech platforms. He employs methods such as field experiments, machine learning, and econometrics in his work and collaborates with firms and governments for his research. He holds a PhD from INSEAD and obtained his BTech & MTech (Dual Degree) from IIT Kharagpur in Mechanical Engineering. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company and managed operations for one of the largest FMCG companies in India. He manages the PhD program in his area and serves as an advisor to several startups. He is an AE at Decision Sciences Journal. More about his profile can be found here.

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