Ivo Vlaev, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Excessive drinkers are more likely to seek help when their drinking habits are compared with their peers than when they are simply given the guidelines.
The Paris climate deal has been criticised for not being strong enough. But behavioural economics studies show weak deals can work out better in the long run.
Foundation essay: This article is part of a series marking the launch of The Conversation in the US. Our foundation essays are longer than our usual comment and analysis articles and take a wider look…
It took decades for behavioural economics to break into the mainstream. Now, after just a few years of “bias”, “anchoring” and “nudge”, some critics are already questioning whether it has anything left…
Experimenting with bubbles.
Flickr/Indigo Skies Photography
Some shares have new owners every second. Today much of the buying and selling is done by computers, but some still rely on human intuition – the gut feeling of the experienced trader. “Nobody can predict…
Australian households currently pay the second highest “honesty tax” in the world at $290 per household per year, levied by retailers to offset the $AU1.86 billion in losses they incur from customer theft…
People are notoriously bad at filtering choices - being faced with too many leads us to choose poorly.
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Helen Westerman, The Conversation and Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation
We are faced with a myriad of choice in our lives - but an emerging body of work suggests the more choice we’re faced with, the more likely we’ll make a poor decision. The conundrum is called the “curse…
Neuroeconomics is a burgeoning field aimed at helping us understand decision-making.
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Whether choosing a dinner, a car, a spouse or an investment, experts now know what part of the brain our likes and dislikes are encoded, how we represent alternatives, and even how we choose. This has…
‘Nudge’ theory - a form of behavioural economics - encourages rather than coerces.
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Earlier this week an impressive cast of academics, policy experts and business leaders gathered in Sydney at the inaugural Behavioural Exchange meeting to talk about “nudges”. Made famous by Richard Thaler…
All in the wording: behavioural science, such as the ‘nudge’ concept isn’t new, or quasi-science.
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In recent years, books like Predictably Irrational, Nudge and Thinking Fast and Slow have catapulted the findings of behavioural science (think cognitive psychology and behavioural economics) into new-found…
In George Orwell’s futuristic dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien, an apparatchik of the Thought Police come sadistic torturer, famously boasts to the book’s protagonist Winston Smith, “We create human…
Some pensioners forgot to save for a rainy day.
PA
The recent budget announcement providing freedom for retirees to decide how to allocate their own pension pots was a bold and surprising move. However, a number of issues are clearly opened by this policy…
Greed is good. So is envy. So says Boris Johnson, who told the Centre for Policy Studies that the two deadly sins were “a valuable spur to economic activity”. Boris was invoking behavioural economics to…