Summer Institute 2018 - Boost vs. Nudge - Till Grüne-Yanoff

BOOST VS. NUDGE—HOW TO CATEGORIZE AND EVALUATE BEHAVIORAL POLICIES
Recent theoretical efforts to model boundedly rational agents have had considerable impact on policy-making. The implications of these theories especially about the interaction of agents cognitive limitations, their behavior, and the structure of their environments has influenced policy designers’ proposals on how and where to intervene in order to improve people’s decisions. Such efforts have produced a number of different behavioral interventions. In particular, a distinction between two types of policy has been recently proposed: nudges and boosts. In the talk, I will analyze this distinction on the basis of the mechanisms through which each policy is supposed to operate. By modeling and analyzing these mechanisms, we identify the contextual conditions that are necessary for each policy approach to be successful. We thus provide a framework that allows to determine which type of policy is more likely to achieve a behavioral goal in a given situation. This framework will be helpful to the policy maker in systematically planning, testing, and implementing effective policies, complementing existing empirical evidence and directing efforts in generating novel observations.

TILL GRÜNE-YANOFF
Till Grüne-Yanoff is Professor of Philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. His research focuses on the philosophy of science and on decision theory.

SUMMER INSTITUTE
The 2018 Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality took place on June 19 – 27, 2018, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany.