nudge

Supporting Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Nudging, Boosting or Both?

Heuristics play an important role in daily judgments and decision-making, but a scientific debate has been ongoing as to whether heuristics result in systematic errors or make us smarter. Both approaches have resulted in tools to support decision-making. Nudges address systematic errors and biases, while boosts support informed decision-making under uncertainty. But can these two opposing approaches be integrated into one framework?

Nudges in Personal Finance: The Case of Overdrafts

Unarranged overdrafts are financial products which help personal current account holders deal with outstanding balances or declined payments. However, consumers have the tendency to use these products too often, underestimating their negative financial consequences. Concerned by their financial well-being, the Financial Conduct Authority in the United Kingdom has begun to address the issue through the application of nudges.

Using Multiple Social Nudges to Reduce Peak Energy Demand

Can multiple social nudges be combined to achieve behavior change in electricity consumption? Find out in this post.

Why Talking Calories Defeats the Point of Nudging

A frequent misconception we hold is believing that what makes food healthy or unhealthy is the number of calories it contains. We know that soda is unhealthy and has a lot of calories and that chamomile infusion is healthy and does not have a lot of calories.

Why We’re Loving It: The Psychology Behind the McDonald’s Restaurant of the Future

Insights into the innovative behavioural design that underpins McDonald’s reinvention.

Behavioural Science, Rationality and Public Policy

The language of rationality is closely tied to ideas from behavioural science, economics and nudge theory, but how does it shape the way we make public policy and should we be casting it under a critical eye? Read this post to find out more.

What is the Future of Behavioral Research and Large-scale Nudges? Five Practical Tips

By Nathan Maddix   Can Nudging Overcome Physics Envy? As is now well-known, tremendous results have been found for nudges – behavioral interventions designed to facilitate choice for welfare-promoting outcomes. In my work over the last 5 years, I have sought not only to design and administer nudges, but also to understand how economists and [...]

Three Ways the Internet of Things Is Shaping Consumer Behavior

The interconnection of devices within the “Internet of Things” (IoT) creates new data sources. Companies can now better observe people’s choices and test the effectiveness of different mechanisms to activate and retain more customers. It may also help policymakers overcome one of the most frequent problems of policy design: the lack of personalized content. We argue that the IoT not only disrupts the way we track our actions and monitor our goals, but also allows the identification of effective methods to alter our behavior. This is optimized by the combination of IoT, data analytics and behavioral science.

A Nudge in the Green Direction

Despite good intentions, environmentally friendly attitudes do not always translate into corresponding food choices (the so-called intention-behavior gap). To investigate the potential benefits of behavioral nudges, the Flemish government’s Environmental, Nature and Energy Department, together with its partners, conducted tests in several retail locations. The results of our research are reported in this post.

A Run-Down of the CEGA Behavioral Economics in Global Health Conference

“How can we use behavioral insights to nudge individuals into better health decision making?” This is one of the fundamental questions that inspired the third annual Conference on Behavioral Economics (BE) in Global Health at UC Berkeley, organized by the Behavioral Economics in Reproductive Health Initiative (BERI) at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA).

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