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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Why do some people get stuck in poverty? Most answers to this question start with the idea that external constraints trap people in poverty. These constraints could take the form of malfunctioning credit…