By Francesco Amighetti and Beatrice Del Frate Few political and social occasions have been needing and taking advantage of behavioural insights as much as the period preceding political elections and the moment of the vote itself. In fact, nowadays, two major problems obstruct the correct and useful functioning of the democratic ritual that voting represents: on […]
App(lication)s of Behavioral Economics
By Francesco Amighetti and Beatrice Del Frate The core principle that is at the heart of the nudge theory is that “change comes not from the inside, but the outside”, as clearly expressed by Dan Ariely – professor of psychology and behavioral economics and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. For […]
Good Resolutions and How to Keep Them
By Beatrice Del Frate and Francesco Amighetti Christmas holidays represent a good moment to spend time with family and friends and to escape from routine. After majestic meals and never-ending celebrations, the onset of the new year is always accompanied by a list of desires, very likely the ones we had the previous year. Probably […]
Espresso…What else?
Just start with few questions for coffee-addicted people: how many coffees do you take per day and how much sugar do you usually consume per coffee? We all know that the world divides into two types of people: those who like their coffee natural, and those who like it sweet (sometimes very sweet). If you […]
Behavioural Insights and Crime: Part I
Violence against Women (VAW) When you think of BI and crime, shows like Criminal Minds and Mindhunter (both of which the author of this blog post highly recommends) come to mind. However, tackling VAW requires more than psycho-analysing perpetrators. This is because there are a multitude of other factors leading to the creation of a […]
Interview with Guglielmo Briscese
Guglielmo Briscese is a Senior Advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in Sydney, Australia. He did his Bachelor’s in Economics from Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy, MSc. in International Development from University of Glasgow and PhD in Economics from the University of Sydney. The main focus of his research and work are pro-social […]
A little encouragement goes a long way
When we think about improving student performance, we usually think of major changes in the education system, improving infrastructure, hiring more qualified teachers, etc. All of which are important of course, but could we be missing something? Perhaps something less costly and easier to implement? Having someone that supports you in your activities is important. […]
Review of a paper by Liu, Feng, Suo, Lee, Li (2012) In previous posts (“Scarcity”, “Through the psychology of poverty”), we showed how scarcity affects the way people consider problems and take decisions. Although scarcity may concern many kinds of goods, including even available time, in this article we will consider only the lack of […]
The key assumption in neoclassical economic theory is that individuals are perfectly capable of taking rational decisions, translated into the homo economicus ideal-type. But what happens if individuals are not in perfect health and have their decision-making process threatened? Lately, much has been discussed about the rise in mental health issues, especially among youngsters. In […]
Challenging the Broken-Window theory
How can we prevent individuals from urinating in open areas? In the Nudge TV show “The Power of Habit”, Sille Krukow, a behavioural expert based in Denmark, designed a nudge to help the Copenhagen Central Station. The problem they were faced with was that many men would urinate in hidden corners outside the building, despite […]