Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?

Benartzi, Shlomo; Beshears, John; Milkman, Katherine L.; Sunstein, Cass R.; Thaler, Richard H.; Shankar, Maya; Tucker-Ray, Will; Congdon, William J.; Galing, Steven

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2982109

Cited by 98 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…We suggest that this approach can also be useful with parents (e.g., Mueller, Rowe, & Zuckerman, ). This simple mindset messaging might be just the kind of “nudge” (Thaler & Sunstein, ) parents need to promote behaviors at scale that positively contribute to their children's development during early childhood (Benartzi et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

Rowe

Leech

2019

Developmental Science

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Socioeconomic disparities in children's early vocabulary skills can be traced back to disparities in gesture use at age one and are due, in part, to the quantity and quality of communication children are exposed to by parents. Further, parents' mindsets about intelligence contribute to their interactions with their children. We implemented a parent gesture intervention with a growth mindset component with 47 parents of 10‐month‐olds to determine whether this approach would increase parents' use of the pointing gesture, infants' use of pointing, and child vocabulary growth. The intervention had an effect on parent gesture such that by child age 12‐months, parents who received the intervention increased in their pointing more than parents in the control condition. Importantly, the intervention also had a significant effect on child gesture use with parents. There was no main effect of the intervention on child vocabulary. Further, the effect of the intervention on pointing was stronger for parents who endorsed fixed mindsets at baseline, and had an added benefit of increased vocabulary growth from 10–18 months for children of those parents who endorsed fixed mindsets. Incorporating growth mindset approaches into parenting interventions is encouraged.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

Rowe

Leech

2019

Developmental Science

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“…However, people do not make completely rational decisions, as we know from the groundbreaking work of Herbert Simon (); for recent discussions in public administration, see Battaglio Jr. et al ; Grimmelikhuijsen et al ). Policy makers can—and often should—use notions of bounded rationality for behavior change (Benartzi et al ; Shafir ; Zamir and Teichman ). In their groundbreaking book Nudge (), Thaler and Sunstein describe how policy makers can use such insights.…”

Section: Policy Instruments To Stimulate Behavior Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Policy and Behavior Change

Tummers

2019

Public Administration Review

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Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems, such as obesity, alcohol abuse, and debt problems. This article has two goals. First, it aims to highlight how governments can try to change the behavior of citizens. Government can use policy instruments to do so, including incentives, bans and mandates, information campaigns, and nudges. However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies policy instruments without societal support. Therefore, the second goal of the article is to provide a conceptual framework that helps analyze whether public policies to stimulate behavior change are effective and supported by key stakeholders. This conceptual framework has five criteria indicating the extent to which there is effective and supported behavior change: the policy is (1) effective and (2) efficient, and there is support for the policy among (3) politicians, (4) implementing organizations, and (5) citizens. The article ends with suggestions to study public policy aimed at behavior change.

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“…This has caused some to question whether hightouch financial education is cost-effective (Willis, 2011;Benartzi et al, 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

Behavioral Household Finance

Beshears

Choi

Laibson

et al. 2018

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This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the classical model and explanations grounded in behavioral economics that can account for the observed patterns. This part covers five topics: consumption and savings, borrowing, payments, asset allocation, and insurance. The second part addresses interventions that firms, governments, and other parties deploy to shape household financial outcomes: education and information, peer effects and social influence, product design, advice and disclosure, choice architecture, and interventions that directly target prices or quantities. This chapter is divided into two parts, each of which is further divided into several sections. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing both extensions of the classical model and explanations grounded in behavioral economics that can account for the observed patterns. This part covers five topics: (I) consumption and savings, (II) borrowing, (III) payments, (IV) asset allocation, and (V) insurance. The second part addresses interventions that firms, governments, and other parties deploy to shape household financial outcomes: (VI) education and information, (VII) peer effects and social influence, (VIII) product design, (IX) advice and disclosure, (X) choice architecture, and (XI) interventions that directly target prices or quantities. The final section of the paper (XII) concludes. John BeshearsWe offer broad coverage of the household finance literature, but we limit the scope of our discussion along some dimensions. We focus on the U.S. institutional context and on empirical work based on U.S. data, although we do bring evidence from other wealthy countries to bear when germane and occasionally reference evidence from developing countries. We address household asset allocation but do not draw out its implications for asset pricing, which are covered by the asset pricing chapter in this handbook. Although household decisions regarding health care are relevant to household finance, we largely omit this literature from our chapter because it is covered in depth in the chapter on behavioral health economics. Finally, there is some overlap between our section on financial product design and the chapter on behavioral industrial organization; we refer readers to that chapter for related material on that topic. Part 1: Facts I. Consumption and SavingsBeginning with the seminal work of Modigliani and Brumberg (1954) and Friedman (1957), economists have embraced the view that households choose to save and borrow to smooth consumption over the lifecycle. Intuitively, if agents have concave utility functions over consumption, then they should spread consumption across time to optimally...

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Should Governments Invest More in Nudging?

Cited by 98 publications

References 54 publications

A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

Public Policy and Behavior Change

Behavioral Household Finance

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