Below from Robert Murphy in the Irish Department of Health details the latest in a series of reports and publications on behaviourally-informed health policy in Ireland. Further details including links to papers are available on the following website.  This paper reports the impact of a collaborative quality improvement project between the Department of Health, the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), and the Health Service Executive (HSE). It shows that using amended text (SMS) reminder content, informed by behavioural science, reduced DNA rates for outpatient hospital appointments ..read more

 ? Introducing our Wider World Corporate Behavioural Science Ethics Initiative ? Our Wider World seminars have seen speakers from around the world discuss issues at the heart of the application of behavioural science in public and private settings. ? One addition to the seminars has been the creation of behavioural science and wider world projects. Each year, groups of students work with faculty and researchers on cutting-edge topics that are converted into white papers and similar. ? One project from this has been the development of the FORGOOD ethics framework for corp ..read more

After at least two decades of being actively considered in Ireland, pension autoenrolment is now being established as part of the Irish policy system, I spoke at the Citizens assembly on pensions in 2018 and outlined the various factors that might need to be considered where a pension auto-enrolment system to be implemented in Ireland. (here is a post on this blog from 2011 discussing a previous version of autoenrolment for Ireland that eventually got stalled).  Key features of the scheme include: - 1)Phased Implementation All employees not already in an occupational pension scheme o ..read more

The news arrived this week of the death of Daniel Kahneman at age 90. Kahneman was a noted psychologist obviously and his work with Amos Tversky had a foundational influence on the development of behavioural economics and a range of related fields. His work on prospect theory and judgement and biases were already heavily embedded in several areas when he was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in 2002. Several popular talks and his book Thinking Fast and Slow made him known to a much wider public audience in the later phase of his life.  I met him on a couple of occasions. I was a fellow at ..read more

Disclaimer: I sometimes discuss live policy issues on this blog. All opinions expressed are my own and do not represent the views of LSE or any other entity. A recent NBER paper by Benedict Gutmann-Kenney, Paul Adams, Stefan Hunt, David Laibson, Neil Stewart, and Jesse Leary examines what happens when you remove the minimum payment anchor from credit cards. Abstract below.  We run a field experiment and a survey experiment to study an active choice nudge. Our nudge is designed to reduce the anchoring of credit card payments to the minimum payment. In our field experiment, the nudge reduce ..read more

There are several places on this blog where we have covered ethical issues in applying behavioural science (reading list here, link to our FORGOOD ethics framework here, blogpost on recent ideas and applications in incorporating ethical issues in behavioural science here).  As part of our wider world initiative at the Department, our students work in groups to examine different aspects of how behavioural science is integrated into institutions. Thanks to Annabel Gillard and Bishin Ho from last year's group for working on a project that examined the extent to which the FORGOOD framework co ..read more

Disclaimer: I sometimes discuss live policy issues on this blog. All opinions expressed are my own and do not represent the views of LSE or any other entity.  The Irish Revenue Service has a solid track record of engaging with behavioural science and related literature e.g. see their 2017 working paper outlining a range of experiments and data work over the previous decade. (See also a paper from the Irish Department of Finance on behavioural economics and tax policy here). Recently, the Irish government have been engaging in a campaign to help citizens avoid overpaying tax. Some details ..read more

I posted previously about our recent paper (with Lucie Martin and Orla Doyle) on administrative burdens and inequality. That paper used episode reconstruction methods to examine the distributional aspects of administration. A follow-up paper now published in the excellent Journal of Behavioural Public Administration examines the distributional impacts of administrative burdens on decision-making using choice experiments. The abstract is below and paper is linked here.  Administrative burdens may discourage people, especially vulnerable groups, from acting in their own best interest ..read more

Since developing courses in Dublin in 2008 and then in Stirling, a key preoccupation among a group of us has been to ensure programmes in the area of behavioural science is to ensure there is adequate space for reflection on ethics aspects. Along with Leonhard Lades we published a paper condensing a vast literature (summarised here in a previous blogpost) down to seven dimensions using the FORGOOD acronym. We have used this framework for teaching and planning in various ways and it has been picked up quite a bit by various organisations developing their own ethical processes (e.g. see some rec ..read more

One thing I like about working in academia is the variety of styles of corridor talk you encounter that challenge your perspective on things you think are most likely to be true. I have tried to keep a fairly Humean view on things and not get too personally wedded to empirical generalisations. Having said that, I would still be very surprised if I get to the end of my life not believing that default effects matter in several circumstances beyond purely incentive effects, or that people make decisions on financial products based on confusion at least partly engendered deliberately by the provid ..read more