Riccardo Viale

How “nudges” by government can empower citizens without manipulating their preferences or exploiting their biases. We’re all familiar with the idea of “nudging”—using behavioral mechanisms to encourage people to make certain choices—popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their bestselling 2008 book Nudge. This approach, also known as “libertarian paternalism,” goes beyond typical programs that simply provide information and incentives; nudges can range from automatic enrollment in a pension plan to flu-shot scheduling. In Nudging, Riccardo Viale explores the evolution of nudging and proposes new approaches that would empower citizens without manipulating them paternalistically. He shows that we can use the tools of the behavioral sciences without abandoning the principle of conscious decision-making. Viale discusses the work of Herbert Simon, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky that laid the foundation of behavioral economics, describes how policy makers have sought to help people avoid bad decisions, offers examples of effective nudging, and considers how to nudge the nudgers. How can we tell good nudges from bad nudges? Viale explains that good nudges help us avoid bias and encourage deliberate decision making; bad nudges, on the other hand, use bias to nudge people unconsciously into unintentional behaviors. Bad nudges attempt to compel decisions based on economic rationality. Good nudges encourage decisions based on a pragmatic, adaptive, ecological kind of rationality. Policy makers should take note.

Nudging

Keith Frankish

Laura Macchi

Maria Bagassi

Examining the role of implicit, unconscious thinking on reasoning, decision making, problem solving, creativity, and its neurocognitive basis, for a genuinely psychological conception of rationality.

Cognitive Unconscious and Human Rationality

Henry Etzkowitz

This book is an authoritative confirmation of the critical role that knowledge plays in economic transformation. It is an indispensable roadmap for new research programmes and a guidepost for policy makers around the world. Calestous Juma, Harvard Kennedy School, US How to use and capitalize knowledge for the benefit of society has become even more urgent in the present financial and economic crisis. This book embraces the tensions inherent in the complex governance of research and innovation. It argues for strategies appropriate to the behaviour of complex adaptive systems in an evolutionary mode, thereby highlighting in a timely manner the necessary fit between organizational forms and the epistemological structure of knowledge in the overall context of a fertile investment climate. Helga Nowotny, European Research Council, WWTF Vienna Science and Technology Fund, Austria In the 21st century, economic and social development depends increasingly on knowledge rather than labour and capital. This book examines how knowledge is exploited through the development of innovations that yield economic and other benefits. The authors, who include leading figures from the field of innovation studies, look in particular at the growing links between universities, government and industry and the evolving triple helix relationship as they attempt to develop more effective means for capitalizing on knowledge. The book will be of considerable interest to policy-makers and to senior managers in industry and universities as well as to innovation scholars. Ben Martin, University of Sussex, UK In recent years, university industry government interactions have come to the forefront as a method of promoting economic growth in increasingly knowledge-based societies. This ground-breaking new volume evaluates the capacity of the triple helix model to represent the recent evolution of local and national systems of innovation. It analyses both the success of the triple helix as a descriptive and empirical model within internationally competitive technology regions as well as its potential as a prescriptive hypothesis for regional or national systems that wish to expand their innovation processes and industrial development. In addition, it examines the legal, economic, administrative, political and cognitive dimensions employed to configure and study, in practical terms, the series of phenomena contained in the triple helix category. This book will have widespread appeal amongst students and scholars of economics, sociology and business administration who specialise in entrepreneurship and innovation. Policy-makers involved in innovation, industrial development and education as well as private firms and institutional agencies will also find the volume of interest.

A Triple Helix of University-industry-government

The Capitalization of Knowledge

Umberto Filotto

Barbara Alemanni

Shabnam Mousavi

This innovative book explores how the design of financial education programmes could benefit from the findings of behavioural economics and finance and cognitive sciences. It covers the social, cultural and technological determinants of financial education, the role of the banking system in promoting financial literacy, and how governments and regulatory authorities are dealing with financial education and risk literacy programmes in schools.

Financial Education and Risk Literacy

Herbert Simon’s renowned theory of bounded rationality is principally interested in cognitive constraints and environmental factors and influences which prevent people from thinking or behaving according to formal rationality. Simon’s theory has been expanded in numerous directions and taken up by various disciplines with an interest in how humans think and behave. This includes philosophy, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, economics, political science, sociology, management, and organization studies. The Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality draws together an international team of leading experts to survey the recent literature and the latest developments in these related fields. The chapters feature entries on key behavioural phenomena, including reasoning, judgement, decision making, uncertainty, risk, heuristics and biases, and fast and frugal heuristics. The text also examines current ideas such as fast and slow thinking, nudge, ecological rationality, evolutionary psychology, embodied cognition, and neurophilosophy. Overall, the volume serves to provide the most complete state-of-the-art collection on bounded rationality available. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of economics, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, political sciences, and philosophy.

Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality

Financial markets are complex. Regulators strive to predict ways in which they can malfunction and create rules to prevent this from happening, yet behavioural impacts are often overlooked. This book explores how behavioural finance can go hand-in-hand with traditional methods to help banks and regulators create better policies. It also demonstrates how the behavioural finance revolution has opened the way to a more integrated approach to the analysis of economic phenomena.

Riccardo Viale

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