Combining Nudges and Boosts to Increase Precautionary Saving

Combining Nudges and Boosts to Increase Precautionary Saving
Author: Shane Timmons
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

Many households lack savings to cushion them from financial shocks. While behavioural economics offers insights into why some households who want to save may fail to do so, successful behavioural interventions to increase precautionary saving are elusive. We incorporated multiple evidence-based "nudges" and "boosts" into a savings account application form at a major commercial bank and designed an electronic marketing communication to explain cumulative risk based on a scalable boost. In a pre-registered randomised controlled trial, these interventions increased saving account uptake by 25-40%. Moreover, some effects were concentrated among low-income households.

Behavioral Public Policy in a Global Context

Behavioral Public Policy in a Global Context
Author: Michael Sanders
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 303131509X

The academic field of behavioral science has developed rapidly in recent decades. The field draws on research from across the social and natural sciences, and it has consistently shown that humans are not always rational. This insight has had a profound impact on multiple fields, including economics, political science, and law. Since the early 2000s, the application of behavioral science to public policy has also grown exponentially. Policymakers and practitioners now regularly use behavioral science to rethink how they develop programs and solve social problems. The impact has been far-reaching; behavioral science has transformed how we think about the economy, public health, education, and beyond. In practice, behavioral insights have been used to raise tax revenues, help people access social welfare program benefits and employment opportunities, increase voter turnout, boost medication adherence, and more. There are now hundreds of entities – international organizations, governments, business, and nonprofits – building and investing in internal behavioral science teams. Unfortunately, most of the hard work of putting these teams together and applying behavioral science insights happens “behind the scenes.” This book unearths some of the stories and insights from pioneers in applied behavioral science, in their own words. How did their teams come about, and how did they grow? What projects have worked, and which have not? What have they learned, and what would they recommend to others seeking to build behavioral science teams of their own?

Save More Tomorrow

Save More Tomorrow
Author: Shlomo Benartzi
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2012-04-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 110158033X

One of the world’s top experts in behavioral finance offers innovative strategies for improving 401(k) plans. Half of Americans do not have access to a retirement saving plan at their workplace. Of those who do about a third fail to join. And those who do join tend to save too little and often make unwise investment decisions. In short, the 401(k) world is in crisis, and workers need help. Save More Tomorrow provides that help by focusing on the behavioral challenges that led to this crisis inertia, limited self-control, loss aversion, and myopia—and transforms them into behavioral solutions. These solutions, or tools, are based on cutting edge behavioral finance research and they can dramatically improve outcomes by, for example, helping employees: -Save, even if they aren’t ready to do so now, by using future enrollment. -Save more by showing them images of their future selves. -Save smarter by reshuffling the order of funds on the investment menu. Save More Tomorrow is the first comprehensive application of behavioral finance to improve retirement outcomes. It also makes it easy for plan sponsors and their advisers to apply these behavioral tools using its innovative Behavioral Audit process.

Policy and Choice

Policy and Choice
Author: William J. Congdon
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0815704984

Argues that public finance--the study of the government's role in economics--should incorporate principles from behavior economics and other branches of psychology.

World Development Report 1978

World Development Report 1978
Author:
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 135
Release: 1978
Genre: Adaptation (Biology)
ISBN: 0821372823

This first report deals with some of the major development issues confronting the developing countries and explores the relationship of the major trends in the international economy to them. It is designed to help clarify some of the linkages between the international economy and domestic strategies in the developing countries against the background of growing interdependence and increasing complexity in the world economy. It assesses the prospects for progress in accelerating growth and alleviating poverty, and identifies some of the major policy issues which will affect these prospects.

OECD Pensions Outlook 2020

OECD Pensions Outlook 2020
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9264680160

The 2020 edition of the OECD Pensions Outlook examines a series of policy options to help governments improve the sustainability and resilience of pension systems.

Bounded Rationality

Bounded Rationality
Author: Sanjit Dhami
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2022-07-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262369656

Two leaders in the field explore the foundations of bounded rationality and its effects on choices by individuals, firms, and the government. Bounded rationality recognizes that human behavior departs from the perfect rationality assumed by neoclassical economics. In this book, Sanjit Dhami and Cass R. Sunstein explore the foundations of bounded rationality and consider the implications of this approach for public policy and law, in particular for questions about choice, welfare, and freedom. The authors, both recognized as experts in the field, cover a wide range of empirical findings and assess theoretical work that attempts to explain those findings. Their presentation is comprehensive, coherent, and lucid, with even the most technical material explained accessibly. They not only offer observations and commentary on the existing literature but also explore new insights, ideas, and connections. After examining the traditional neoclassical framework, which they refer to as the Bayesian rationality approach (BRA), and its empirical issues, Dhami and Sunstein offer a detailed account of bounded rationality and how it can be incorporated into the social and behavioral sciences. They also discuss a set of models of heuristics-based choice and the philosophical foundations of behavioral economics. Finally, they examine libertarian paternalism and its strategies of “nudges.”

Between Empowerment and Manipulation

Between Empowerment and Manipulation
Author: Marijn Sax
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9403537922

Popular health apps are commercial services. Despite the promise of empowerment they offer, the tensions introduced by their data-driven, dynamically adjustable digital environments engender a potential for manipulation to which their designers and operators can easily succumb. In this important book, the author develops an ethical framework to evaluate the commercial practices of for-profit health apps, proceeding to a detailed proposal of how to legally address the exploitation, for financial gain, of users’ need for health. Focusing on the intricate tracking of users over time, coupled with the possibility to personalize the environment based on knowledge gained from tracking, the book’s in-depth analysis of popular for-profit health apps engages with such particulars as the following: the strategic framing of health in health apps; the cultural tendency to presume we are unhealthy until we have proven we are healthy; the key concepts of autonomy, vulnerability, trust, and manipulation; how health apps develop ongoing profitable relationships with users; and use of misleading and aggressive commercial practices. The author argues that the European Union’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, when informed by ethical considerations, offers promising legal solutions to the manipulation concerns raised by popular for-profit health apps. The book will be welcomed not only for its incisive scrutiny of the health app phenomenon but also for the light it sheds on the wider problems inherent in the digital society—what digital environments know about their users, how they use that knowledge, and for which purpose. Its progress from an ethical approach to legal solutions will recommend the book to lawyers concerned with business practices, human resources professionals, policymakers, and academics interested in the intersection of ethics and law.

Handbook of Behavioral Economics - Foundations and Applications 1

Handbook of Behavioral Economics - Foundations and Applications 1
Author:
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 749
Release: 2018-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0444633898

Handbook of Behavioral Economics: Foundations and Applications presents the concepts and tools of behavioral economics. Its authors are all economists who share a belief that the objective of behavioral economics is to enrich, rather than to destroy or replace, standard economics. They provide authoritative perspectives on the value to economic inquiry of insights gained from psychology. Specific chapters in this first volume cover reference-dependent preferences, asset markets, household finance, corporate finance, public economics, industrial organization, and structural behavioural economics. This Handbook provides authoritative summaries by experts in respective subfields regarding where behavioral economics has been; what it has so far accomplished; and its promise for the future. This taking-stock is just what Behavioral Economics needs at this stage of its so-far successful career. - Helps academic and non-academic economists understand recent, rapid changes in theoretical and empirical advances within behavioral economics - Designed for economists already convinced of the benefits of behavioral economics and mainstream economists who feel threatened by new developments in behavioral economics - Written for those who wish to become quickly acquainted with behavioral economics