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Paper short abstract

We test whether an IVR narrative game builds “critical capabilities”—fraud-resistant judgment under urgency and ambiguity—among mobile money users in Uganda. A randomized trial with Viamo links survey outcomes to administrative complaints. We also discuss scale-up challenges with the regulator.

Paper long abstract

Digital markets demand judgment and autonomy in environments engineered to steer attention. The same tools that personalize finance and communication lower the cost of persuasion and, in adversarial hands, deception. This tension is acute in developing countries, where mobile money has driven financial inclusion while shifting risk onto consumers making high-urgency decisions on basic phones with limited recourse.

We argue that consumer protection in adversarial digital markets must build critical capabilities—the capacities that make consumers and citizens autonomous. Not generic “awareness,” these include trainable skills of discernment and action under pressure: distinguishing legitimate from deceptive contact, executing verification routines, and choosing protective responses (pause, verify, refuse, report). We test a scalable method to build these capabilities experimentally.

In partnership with Viamo, we evaluate a 20-minute interactive voice response (IVR) narrative game for mobile money users in Uganda. The intervention simulates scam scripts, prompts choices in real time, and provides immediate feedback to practice routines. IVR supports inclusion by reaching low-literacy users without smartphones through the same communication layer where scams arrive.

In a large randomized evaluation linking survey outcomes to administrative data, we find durable impacts nine months after exposure. Treated users report fewer fraud losses and stronger protective practices, and administrative records show increased complaints, consistent with greater consumer voice rather than higher fraud incidence. We also observe calibrated trust and sustained engagement with digital financial services. Ongoing work with Uganda’s communications regulator (UCC) explores scale-up, costs, and how to build consumer-protection infrastructure.