Advances in behavioral economics Camerer, Colin F; Loewenstein, George; Rabin, Matthew
2004, 2004., 20111212, 2011, 2003, 2011-12-12, 20030101
eBook, Book
Twenty years ago, behavioral economics did not exist as a field. Most economists were deeply skeptical--even antagonistic--toward the idea of importing insights from psychology into their field. ...Today, behavioral economics has become virtually mainstream. It is well represented in prominent journals and top economics departments, and behavioral economists, including several contributors to this volume, have garnered some of the most prestigious awards in the profession.
This book assembles the most important papers on behavioral economics published since around 1990. Among the 25 articles are many that update and extend earlier foundational contributions, as well as cutting-edge papers that break new theoretical and empirical ground.
Advances in Behavioral Economics will serve as the definitive one-volume resource for those who want to familiarize themselves with the new field or keep up-to-date with the latest developments. It will not only be a core text for students, but will be consulted widely by professional economists, as well as psychologists and social scientists with an interest in how behavioral insights are being applied in economics.
The articles, which follow Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein's introduction, are by the editors, George A. Akerlof, Linda Babcock, Shlomo Benartzi, Vincent P. Crawford, Peter Diamond, Ernst Fehr, Robert H. Frank, Shane Frederick, Simon Gächter, David Genesove, Itzhak Gilboa, Uri Gneezy, Robert M. Hutchens, Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, David Laibson, Christopher Mayer, Terrance Odean, Ted O'Donoghue, Aldo Rustichini, David Schmeidler, Klaus M. Schmidt, Eldar Shafir, Hersh M. Shefrin, Chris Starmer, Richard H. Thaler, Amos Tversky, and Janet L. Yellen.
Privacy and human behavior in the age of information Acquisti, Alessandro; Brandimarte, Laura; Loewenstein, George
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2015, Volume:
347, Issue:
6221
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This Review summarizes and draws connections between diverse streams of empirical research on privacy behavior. We use three themes to connect insights from social and behavioral sciences: people's ...uncertainty about the consequences of privacy-related behaviors and their own preferences over those consequences; the context-dependence of people's concern, or lack thereof, about privacy; and the degree to which privacy concerns are malleable—manipulable by commercial and governmental interests. Organizing our discussion by these themes, we offer observations concerning the role of public policy in the protection of privacy in the information age.
Information Avoidance Golman, Russell; Hagmann, David; Loewenstein, George
Journal of economic literature,
03/2017, Volume:
55, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We commonly think of information as a means to an end. However, a growing theoretical and experimental literature suggests that information may directly enter the agent's utility function. This can ...create an incentive to avoid information, even when it is useful, free, and independent of strategic considerations. We review research documenting the occurrence of information avoidance, as well as theoretical and empirical research on reasons why people avoid information, drawing from economics, psychology, and other disciplines. The review concludes with a discussion of some of the diverse (and often costly) individual and societal consequences of information avoidance.
We present findings from a field experiment conducted at 40 elementary schools involving 8000 children and 400,000 child-day observations, which tested whether providing short-run incentives can ...create habit formation in children. Over a 3- or 5-week period, students received an incentive for eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch. Relative to an average baseline rate of 39%, providing small incentives doubled the fraction of children eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables. Two months after the end of the intervention, the consumption rate at schools remained 21% above baseline for the 3-week treatment and 44% above baseline for the 5-week treatment. These findings indicate that short-run incentives can produce changes in behavior that persist after incentives are removed.
Policymakers have recently embraced Behavioral Economics as an alternative approach which recognizes the limits and consequences of human decision-making. Early applications of BE (“nudges”) produced ...notable successes and helped to set the stage for more aggressive applications aimed at the deeper causes of policy problems. We contend that policies that aspire to simplify products and incentives, rather than choice environments, aggressively protect consumers from behavioral exploitation, and leverage BE to enhance the design and implementation of traditional policy instruments offer solutions commensurate with contemporary challenges. Case studies in health insurance, privacy, and climate change illustrate the application of these ideas.
Prior research has
shown that people mispredict their own behavior and preferences across affective states.
When people are in an affectively "cold" state, they fail to fully
appreciate how "hot" ...states will affect their own preferences and
behavior. When in hot states, they underestimate the influence of those states and, as a
result, overestimate the stability of their current preferences. The same biases apply
interpersonally; for example, people who are not affectively aroused underappreciate the
impact of hot states on other people's behavior. After reviewing research documenting such
intrapersonal and interpersonal hot-cold empathy gaps, this article examines
their consequences for medical, and specifically cancer-related, decision making, showing,
for example, that hot-cold empathy gaps can lead healthy persons to expose
themselves excessively to health risks and can cause health care providers to undertreat
patients for pain.
Responding to disappointing results from attempts to change behavior via information, not only for diet but for other domains, behavioral economists have proposed a new approach, termed asymmetric ...paternalism or libertarian paternalism, that operates not via information, but by "nudging" individual behavior toward self-interest. This paper summarizes results from two field experiments examining the effects of providing dietary information and of an asymmetrically paternalistic intervention on consumers' selections of food items. The first study compares the impact of providing calorie information to that of making more healthful options more convienient to order. The second study, which focuses only on information provision, examines whether calorie information reduces calorie intake, and, if so, whether its impact depends on the way the information is provided.
Economists have not explicitly denied the existence and significance of visceral factors but have traditionally left them out of their analyses, whether because their influence is perceived as ...transient and hence unimportant, or because they are seen as too unpredictable and complex to be amenable to formal modeling. An attempt is made to show that both of these assumptions are false. Visceral factors have important, but often underappreciated, consequences for behavior. Moreover, both the determinants of visceral factors and their impact on behavior are not only systematic, but amenable to formal modeling.
Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical ...energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain. Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. (White Noise, Don DeLillo)
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