Behavioral Science and Corporate Decision-Making: Potential for Improvement?
Applications of behavioural knowledge could play a crucial role in improving corporate decision-making
Big Data Is Nudging You
Slow to hit the purchase button? Here’s how you may be nudged to buy.
Developing SIMPLER Solutions
The BIAS project completed 15 randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions in child care, child support, and work support programs. This article summarizes the “SIMPLER” framework of behavioral concepts and shares examples of how these concepts were used in BIAS interventions.
A Nudge for Coverage: Last-Mile Problems for Health Insurance
A variety of case studies demonstrate the powerful combination of data science and behavioral science. Perhaps the health insurance market can benefit as well.
Introducing the Concepts of Energy, Force and Power to Economics
By Michael Ryan Economists have historically been enamored with Market Theory and Equilibrium. The notion that “The Market” tends towards a stable state has been more panacea than an effective tool for explaining many facets of our economy. The classical focus on markets and some invisible hand ignores human behavior, profits, debt and financial health [...]
World Bank’s Global INsights Initiative Is Underway
By Julian Jamison One of the World Bank’s flagship publications is the World Development Report, which highlights a different policy-relevant topic every year – often paving the way for novel work on that topic. The latest (2015) report, entitled “Mind, Society, and Behavior” and co-directed by Karla Hoff and Varun Gauri, focused on using [...]
Three Behavioral Insights into the Aging Mind
Behavioural science has contributed much to the understanding of decision-making in the last few decades. We now understand how heuristics and biases can influence our thinking, perceptions, choices and behaviour. Yet, many of the frequently cited studies from behavioural science have been conducted on students, typically in their early twenties. Consequently, people often ask whether these findings still hold in other generations: Does our decision making process differ as we get older? Do we become more or less ‘rational’? And if minds do differ, how does the 20 year old mind differ to the 70 or 80 year old mind?
Obama, Behavioral Insights and Bureaucratic Success
On 15th September 2015, President Obama issued an executive order mandating US government agencies employ behavioural insights to enhance their work (read a White House-authored Fact Sheet on the order). On the face of it, this is an unqualified good for behavioural science. Yet Presidential Terms are short, and the current one has only a year to run. Whether such an executive order will have the impact it should will depend on commentary and promises made in the febrile atmosphere of a US election. Political support is valuable, but political polarisation can mean bureaucratic paralysis. This post takes a brief glance at bureaucratic success in the US, EU, UN and UK.
Five Reasons Why We Compromise Our Privacy Online
Historically, most of us have been concerned about information privacy on the internet. But when it comes to our actual behavior, many of us liberally share personal information online, a finding termed the ‘privacy paradox’ in the academic literature. Why this apparent gap between attitudes and behavior?
The Nudge Is Not Enough! The Love Story Between Behavioral Science and Practical Applications
Nudges are great, but they aren’t enough. While they are elegant, nudges are (often) just tweaks augmenting a pre-existing service or policy regardless of its quality, appropriateness or fitness. It is time to go from nudging to behavioral design.