Direction: Read the given passage carefully to answer the following questions. Each question will have five alternatives as its answer. Choose the correct option as your answer.

A study conducted in collaboration with an online food delivery platform in China found that making “no disposable cutlery” the default choice for orders and rewarding customers with “green points” led to a 648% increase in the share of no-cutlery orders. This step could have significant benefits for the environment, the study said. A team of researchers, led by an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong Guojun He, collaborated with Eleme, Alibaba’s food delivery platform, to analyse customer-level response to green nudges on the platform - changing the default to “no cutlery”, and setting up a reward system where points can be redeemed for planting trees in China’s deserts. Green nudges are gentle persuasions to influence environment-friendly behaviour in people. In behavioural economics, nudges are interventions that influence people’s choices to make certain decisions without _______ the choices available to them. The study with Alibaba used a difference-in-differences model — a statistical technique that compares outcomes over time between the experimental (or treated) group and a control group — and compares food-ordering behaviours of people in control cities versus people in cities where the green nudges were implemented. 

The study also revealed features that distinguish the green nudges under it from the already available literature on the concept. Historically, nudges focus on short-term impacts, but the Alibaba study showed its persisting effect through individuals’ ordering behaviour. Nudges have been criticised in the past for being manipulative: they are not always transparent and can sometimes bank on ignorance or lack of awareness in people to work. However, researchers working on the study have said that the green nudges that they implemented are easy to understand and transparent to users. The reasons and underlying conditions of why and when nudges work are a matter of ongoing debate, and the study reportedly presents data to explore the “underlying mechanisms through which the green nudges affect individuals’ behaviours.” In cities where the study was conducted, Alibaba's user interface was updated to show a window that required the customer to explicitly choose the number of sets of single-use cutlery (SUC) to be delivered with the order. The default option on this window was set to “no cutlery” and customers had to scroll down the screen to choose a different option. To prevent the window from popping up in future orders, customers could set any of the options as their new device-level default by clicking the “set as default” button.