ABSTRACT
Behavioural economics has many insights to offer policy-makers across a range of areas and there is currently a great interest in behavioural techniques and designing policies to facilitate behaviour change – including policy questions ranging across energy decision-making, environmental behaviour change, through to pensions policies and policies to reduce poverty in developing countries. This chapter explores how behavioural insights can and have been applied to resolve a range of pressing policy problems. Behavioural public policy is heavily influenced by contributions from the partnership between behavioural economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar – Cass Sustein. A key focus in behavioural nudging policies is on social influences. A central concept to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s analysis of behavioural public policy is the concept of libertarian paternalism. Behavioural public policy tools are applied particularly widely in development policy-making, to reduce problems of severe poverty in developing countries.
