ABSTRACT
The next field of policy experiments covers many different sectors of activity, and can apply to a wide range of policy problems. It is an approach to making and implementing policy that has become very popular over the last ten years or so and where trials are essential in advancing knowledge and good practice. This area is the behavioral approach to public policy, where ideas from behavioral economics and the behavioral sciences have been applied to solve a range of social problems and to improve the performance of the bureaucracy. The idea is to develop a rich understanding of the cognitions of those who are needed to deliver a good policy outcome and, on the basis of that understanding, have the insight to customize or redesign interventions or modifications to standard operating procedures, such as communications to citizens. This is the agenda of nudge, the idea that citizens can be helped by a favorable redesign of administrative processes, what is called choice architectures, whereby better signals guide citizens to choose a more favorable outcome. Nudge was popularized by Thaler and Sustein (2008) in their eponymous book and offers a clear set of examples of practical things that can be done to change behavior whilst at the same time drawing on about 25 years of theorizing and study in behavioral economics.
Ideas from the behavioral sciences have generated considerable interest and engagement from the policy-makers who have used them to try to transform their bureaucracies and to improve standard procedures. Nudge has also provided a way to address big policy problems, such as those related to health, education, crime, and the environment as these outcomes are often driven by human behavior and specifically behavioral choices that are ingrained and habitual. It is an attempt to break the habits that people are aware of and want to address. The purpose of trials is to test out each nudge and to see if a modification of procedures can be tied to an outcome of interest. The attraction is that the theory or previous research can produce a number of different nudges that the policy-maker could assess and that tests can then provide an answer to the question. The trial, with its capacity to have
several treatment groups in the same design, can compare different policy choices. Not only do trials offer the chance to pick a winner, they provide point estimates of the benefits delivered and money saved, which can feed into cost-benefit decisions and structure the allocation of resources within the bureaucracy. With very clear choices to make, and having clear treatments to administer and to tie to favorable outcomes, these interventions and evaluations appear much more straightforward than the large-scale trials discussed in the previous chapter. They tend to be small scale and more exploratory, done in a relatively short space of time. However, these trials also have own challenges.
