Michael Hallsworth

Elspeth Kirkman

"An authoritative guide for general readers in both public policy and business to help them understand exactly what behavioral insights are, why they matter, and where they may go next"--

Behavioral Insights

An accessible introduction to the behavioral insights approach, which applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems. Our behavior is strongly influenced by factors that lie outside our conscious awareness, although we tend to underestimate the power of this "automatic" side of our behavior. As a result, governments make ineffective policies, businesses create bad products, and individuals make unrealistic plans. In contrast, the behavioral insights approach applies evidence about actual human behavior--rather than assumptions about it--to practical problems. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, written by two leading experts in the field, offers an accessible introduction to behavioral insights, describing core features, origins, and practical examples.

John A. List

Robert D. Metcalfe

Ivo Vlaev

Framing remains one of the pillars of behavioral economics. While framing effects have been found to be quite important in the lab, what is less clear is how well evidence drawn from naturally-occurring settings conforms to received laboratory insights. We use debt obligation to the UK government as a case study to explore the 'omission bias' present in decision making with large stakes. Using a natural field experiment that generates nearly 40,000 observations, we find that repayment rates are roughly doubled when the act is reframed as one of commission rather than omission. We estimate that this reframing of the perceived nature of the action generated over $1.3 million of new yield. We find evidence that this behavior may result from a deliberate 'omission strategy', rather than a behavioral bias, as is often assumed in the literature. Our natural field experiment highlights that behavioral economics is much more than a series of empirical exercises to quench the intellectual curiosity of academics.

Michael Hallsworth

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