We speed and drive aggressively out of overconfidence, and we disregard commonsense safety measures from too much optimism. We may even use a mobile phone while driving, preferring the short-term convenience of using the phone over greater long-term rewards like safety. We engage, in other words, in time discounting, the tendency to assign a lower value to future rewards than … [Read more...] about Improving Road Safety with Behavioral Economics
Inviting Creative Thinkers to Our Free Online Behavioral Economics Course
Behavioral economics is now firmly established as an essential tool in everything from product design and marketing to education and law enforcement. The realization that people have cognitive biases and often make decisions irrationally is not only an important psychological insight. It has also opened up a whole new area of policy innovations over the last 15 years in which … [Read more...] about Inviting Creative Thinkers to Our Free Online Behavioral Economics Course
Behavioral Economics and the Fight against COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an immense impact on people around the world, affecting every aspect of their lives, mostly in a negative way. In Latin America and the Caribbean, most governments have made controlling the spread of the new coronavirus a principal goal. Despite investing immense effort and resources in containing transmission, however, they have been unable to … [Read more...] about Behavioral Economics and the Fight against COVID-19