Behavioural Public Policy Seminars
Online Behavioural Public Policy seminars are offered to International Behavioural Public Policy Association (IBPPA) members. (Note that the annual IBBPA membership fee is £20 and offers a range of benefits.)
The distinguished speakers discuss prominent behavioural public policy themes for the first 15 minutes of each seminar, and this is followed by a 40-minute Q&A discussion with the audience. All seminars are held from 1-2 pm (London time). To become part of the group, please join the IBPPA.
Please join the IBPPA by visiting the IBPPA website.
2023-2024
Please see below the programme for the 2023-24 LSE Hayek Programme - Department of Social Policy Joint BPP seminar series.
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 9 by Lucia Reisch
Date: 20 June 2024
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 8 by Jan Michael Bauer
Date: 23 May 2024
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 7 by Joan Costa Font
Date: 18 April 2024
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 6 by Anne-Lise Sibony
Date: 21 March 2024
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 5 by Yuval Feldman
Date: 22 February 2024
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 4 by Paul Frijters
Date: 18 January 2024
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 3 by Giuseppe Veltri
Date: 14 December 2023
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 2 by Daniel Read
Date: 23 November 2023
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 1 by Cass Sunstein
Date: 19 Octoer 2023
Attending these talks is included in the yearly membership of the Internationa Behavioural Public Policy Association (membership cost is £20).
2022-2023
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 10 by Malte Dold: Individual Agency in Behavioral Public Policy: New Knowledge Problems
Date: 22 June 2023
A number of authors have recently begun to argue for agency-enhancing interventions in BPP, such as assistive curing and boosts. Unlike nudges that re-bias people, these psychologically informed policy interventions aim at de-biasing people by enhancing their reasoning capacities. The agency-centric approach to BPP is laudable from a methodological perspective since it addresses the intricacies of context-dependent preferences. It is also laudable from a normative perspective since it takes the liberal idea of individual self-determination seriously. Yet, it creates 'new' knowledge problems that have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the literature. This article argues that the epistemic challenge of an agency-centric BPP stems from, among other things, (a) its commitment to algorithmic analysis that models actual decision-making processes (in contrast to a reliance on algebraic analysis and as-if models) and (b) the difficulty to differentiate motivational from epistemic concerns that would allow the analyst to identify reasoning failures. This article discusses these challenges and ultimately defends a psychologically grounded agency-oriented approach to BPP that highlights the value of autonomy, i.e., people’s capacity to scrutinize, act on, and identify with their evolving preferences. Such an approach attenuates some of the epistemic problems by shifting the policy focus from process facilitation and situational choice architecture toward institutional analysis.
View the seminar recording on YouTube
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 9 by Sanchayan Banerjee: It's time we put agency into behavioural public policy
Date: 18 May 2023
Promoting agency - people's ability to form intentions and to act on them freely - must become a primary objective for behavioural public policy (BPP). Contemporary BPPs do not directly pursue this objective directly, which is problematic for many reasons. From an ethical perspective, goals like personal autonomy and individual freedom cannot be realised without nurturing citizens' agency. From an efficacy standpoint, BPPs that override agency - for example by activating automatic psychological processes - leave citizens 'in the dark', incapable of internalising and owning the process of behaviour change. This may contribute to non-persistent treatment effects, compensatory negative spillovers or psychological reactance and backfiring effects. In this paper, we argue agency-enhancing BPPs can alleviate these ethical and efficacy limitations to longer-lasting and meaningful behaviour change. We set out philosophical arguments to help us understand and conceptualise agency. Then, we review three alternative agency-enhancing behavioural frameworks, namely boosts, debiasing and nudge+. Using a multi-dimensional framework, we highlight differences in their workings, which offer comparative insights and complementarities in their use. We discuss limitations of agency enhancing BPPs and map out future research directions.
View the seminar recording on YouTube
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 8 by Lis Costa: Behavioural Markets and Regulation
Date: 20 April 2023
Regulators worldwide have made strides over the past decade to embed behavioural science and experimentation to drive better outcomes for consumers and to foster competitive markets. To date, this has mainly focused on designing and testing remedies focused on individual consumers, for example by improving the quality or timeliness of disclosures. There is an opportunity to do more on two fronts. First, using regulation to create an enabling environment. In particular by shaping consumers' economic and digital 'choice environment', making particular behaviours easier, more available, cheaper, more socially acceptable, more timely or the default choice. Second, moving 'upstream' to shape systems and markets in line with collective goals. For example, by incentivising and regulating businesses and other organisations in ways that create the best possible choice environments for individuals.
View the seminar recording on YouTube
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 7 by Pete Lunn: But Does it Work in Theory? A Practitioners' Perspective on Current Debates in Behavioural Public Policy
Date: 16 March 2023
We offer a perspective on two ongoing debates in behavioural public policy: the merits of nudging (versus other approaches) and whether behavioural science should be applied to policy at the level of the individual or the system (i-frame versus s-frame). Our perspective comes from ten years of running Ireland's Behavioural Research Unit, where we have undertaken more than 80 studies for state agencies and government departments, across many different policy problems. On the first issue, we argue that a blanket preference for one type of intervention over another is unhelpful when applying behavioural science to policy. Our work instead aims to identify explicit and transparent criteria for improving people's decisions, generally via diagnostic research specific to the policy context. This diagnostic work may provide evidence to support soft interventions that can be pre-tested (including nudges, boosts and traditional information provision), or orthodox economic policies of regulation or taxation. A prior preference for policy type does not help to solve the policy problem. On the second issue, our experience leaves us sympathetic to the view that some major policy problems require behavioural scientists to operate at the system-level. In areas like climate change and obesity, we increasingly work on public engagement and understanding rather than designing individual-level interventions likely to have only marginal effects. Nevertheless, sometimes i-frame studies help individuals to do better within a system.
View the seminar recording on YouTube
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 6 by Daniel Read: Tainted Nudge? The challenge of combining doing well with doing good
Date: 16 February 2023
The seminar will be based around the general challenge of how people evaluate activities that do good for society, but also earn a profit for the actor. There is some research suggesting that altruistic acts can be heavily "tainted" by the presence of additional selfish or profit motives. In the work discussed -- itself part of a larger project -- we look at whether this tainting applies to organisational nudges. We also consider when and why such tainting might occur.
Read the paper here
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 5 by Avishalom Tor: When Should Government Invest More in Nudging? Revisiting Benartzi et al (2017)
Date: 9 February 2023
View the seminar recording on YouTube
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 4 by Gerd Gigerenzer: From Bounded Rationality to Ecological Rationality
Date: 19 January 2023
View the seminar recording on YouTube
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 3 by Cass Sunstein: TBC
Date: 15 December 2022
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 2 by Rory Sutherland: TBC
Date: 17 November 2022
Behavioural Public Policy Seminar 1 by Paul Frijters: TBC
Date: 13 October 2022