The idea of nudging, designing choices to help people make better choices, has become popular for good reason. The alternative seems to be random, bad, or counterproductive choice design. Governments want taxpayers to respond to letters telling them to send in their taxes on time. The options seems to be 1) trying to develop an effective letter…
Search Results for: nudge
Optimal Distinctiveness and Social Influence
Jonah Berger’s Invisible Influence is in the tradition of informative marketing books based upon behavioural research, think Dan Ariely, Sheena Iyengar, or Chip Heath. He concentrates on social influence, some of the details people may know from elsewhere but all of which are interesting. One of the key themes is that we like “Optimal Distinctiveness”. …
Improving Public Policy
David Halpern is an interesting character. Originally an advisor to Tony Blair’s Labour government he went on to establish the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights for David Cameron’s Conservative government. His CV makes sense to me given what he specializes in. His aim is to make government policy better. The politicians decide what should be done and Halpern tries to ensure it…
Behavioural Economics And Policy In Canada
One of the most interesting things about behavioural economics is that it is quite practical. Insights can be applied, often directly, to issues in the public sphere. Furthermore, many of the ideas generated in behavioural economics are simple tweaks — tweaks can be very cheap which often makes the ideas popular with politicians. After all if…
Nudging: Calm down it really isn’t the end of freedom
Mark D. White has written an ominously titled book “The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism”. He really doesn’t like the sort of Nudging proposed by Thaler and Sunstein. I think that he needs to chill out. He gets excited about minor philosophical issues while ignoring big social issues. He says that no one…
Improving Forecasting
Philip Tetlock’s book on expert political judgment was a classic but he clearly thinks that the message taken from that book was too strong. Previously he suggested that experts just aren’t that good at forecasting. He still retains that theme in his new work — he talks about how expert forecasts are vague and so unfalsifiable. “Fuzzy thinking can never…
Who Doesn’t Want A Competent Government?
The idea of nudging, structuring decisions to encourage people to make good choices, is surprisingly controversial. An example of a nudge might be to encourage those who are qualified to take up a social benefit or to get a tax break to do so. The nudge might be as simple as creating an easy to use application…
Nudging
One of the most popular ideas in the behavioural sciences at the moment is “nudging”. This is applying a light touch to encourage people towards certain actions. “Rather than placing restrictions or changing economic incentives, nudges influence behaviour by changing the way choices are presented in the environment.” (Ly, Mazar, Zhao and Soman 2013). You…
Laziness, A Sustainable Resource
People can be lazy and often don’t find out all information relevant to the decision they are making. These decisions based upon limited information can lead to personally or environmentally destructive outcomes that people wouldn’t make if they thought a little harder. This can be used to indict human beings, aren’t people terrible? I don’t…
Recommended Books
Print PDF eBookHere is a collection of recommended books in various topics. Note while I think these books are worth a read I’m not claiming they are “right”. Some of these I broadly agree with and others not so much but all may help get a conversation going. Recommended Books In Decision Making The area…