See below from Professor Anna Davies from Trinity College Dublin:
Future Earth Ireland are pleased to invite you to our annual event at the Royal Irish Academy on Friday November 17th at 10.45am
This year we are focusing on the important issue of behaviour change and climate change with an exciting line-up of international speakers and national leaders in behaviour change.
Future Earth Ireland is the National Committee of the global programme Future Earth:
Future Earth is a major international research platform providing the knowledge and support to accelerate transformations to a sustainable world. Launched in 2015, Future Earth is a 10-year initiative to advance Global Sustainability Science, build capacity in this rapidly expanding area of research and provide an international research agenda to guide natural and social scientists working around the world. But it is also a platform for international engagement to ensure that knowledge is generated in partnership with society and users of science. We are closely engaged in international processes such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and climate and biodiversity agreements (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and theConvention on Biological Diversity).
On November 10th, we welcome back the distinguished Harvard Law Professor, Cass Sunstein to Dublin. Professor Sunstein will deliver three sessions over the course of the afternoon:
1. The first session will take place from 130pm to 245pm in the UCD Geary Institute and will follow up from his recent talk on new directions in behavioural public policy below. It is aimed at people working directly in this area in Ireland and will be interactive and address practical and conceptual issues in applying this work. We have invited people directly and we welcome expressions of interest for attending from people working on applications of this area in Ireland to be made to geary@ucd.ie
Venue: UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room
130pm: Introduction and Welcome
135pm: Pete Lunn (ESRI): ESRI Research on Behavioural Economics
145pm: Fiona Kiernan (Beaumont Hospital): Behavioural Economics and Sepsis: Towards Hospital Trials
155pm: Karl Purcell (SEAI): Behavioural Economics and Energy Efficiency: Update on SEAI Behavioural Economics Team
205pm: Keith Walsh (Revenue Commissioners): Behavioural Economics and Revenue Behavioural Trials
215pm: Yvonne McCarthy (Central Bank): Behavioural Economics and Financial Regulation
225pm to 255pm: Roundtable discussion with Cass Sunstein about advancing this area in Irish Public Policy
2. The second talk will place from 3pm to 4pm and will outline the ideas from his recently released book "Republic". The sign-up page for this event is available here. A summary of the book is below. The venue is the Clinton Auditorium in UCD.
As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism—and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed.
3. The third talk will place from 4pm to 5pm and will involve the presentation of the Ulysses medal to both Professor Sunstein and former US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. The sign-up page for this event is available here.
Event Description
Former US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, and renowned Behavioural Economist, Professor Cass R. Sunstein, will receive the UCD Ulysses Medal - the highest honour the University can bestow - on Friday, 10 November in UCD O'Brien Centre for Science. Following the Ulysses Medal Presentation Ceremony, Former Ambassador Power and Professor Sunstein will take part in a moderated Q+A on the topics of US foreign policy and on Professor Sunstein's recently released book on impeachment (details here).
The schedule for the event is as follows:
4pm Citation and Award to Ambassador Power (10 mins)
4.10pm Citation and Award to Professor Sunstein (10 mins)
4.20pm moderated Q&A with Amb. Power & Prof. Sunstein on U.S. foreign policy and impeachment (40 mins)
5.00pm Q&A with the audience (20 mins)
5.20pm Refreshments
UCD Ulysses Medal
The UCD Ulysses Medal is the highest honour that University College Dublin can bestow. It was inaugurated in 2005, as part of the University’s sesquicentennial celebrations, to highlight the ‘creative brilliance’ of UCD alumnus James Joyce. It is awarded to individuals whose work has made an outstanding global contribution.
About Cass Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations.
Mr. Sunstein is author of many articles and books, including Republic.com (2001), Risk and Reason (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), The Second Bill of Rights (2004), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Worst-Case Scenarios (2001), Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013) and Why Nudge? (2014) and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (2014). He is now working on group decisionmaking and various projects on the idea of liberty.
About Former Ambassador Samantha Power
Ambassador Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. From 2013 to 2017 Power served as the 28th U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as well as a member of President Obama’s cabinet. In this role, Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, helped build new international law to cripple ISIL’s financial networks, and supported President Obama’s pathbreaking actions to end the Ebola crisis.From 2009 to 2013, Power served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, where she focused on issues including atrocity prevention; UN reform; LGBT and women’s rights; the protection of religious minorities; and the prevention of human trafficking. Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Power is also author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008) and the editor, with Derek Chollet, of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011). She began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe and has twice been named to Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list. Power earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
See below for our opening session on November 10th. This is by invitation only but if you are working on this area in Ireland and would like to come, send us an email at geary@ucd.ie The sign-up pages for Professor Sunstein's public talks are available here
Venue: UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room
130pm: Introduction and Welcome
135pm: Pete Lunn (ESRI): ESRI Research on Behavioural Economics
145pm: Fiona Kiernan (Beaumont Hospital): Behavioural Economics and Sepsis: Towards Hospital Trials
155pm: Karl Purcell (SEAI): Behavioural Economics and Energy Efficiency: Update on SEAI Behavioural Economics Team
205pm: Keith Walsh (Revenue Commissioners): Behavioural Economics and Revenue Behavioural Trials
215pm: Yvonne McCarthy (Central Bank): Behavioural Economics and Financial Regulation
225pm to 255pm: Roundtable discussion with Cass Sunstein about advancing this area in Irish Public Policy
Preliminary Programme: 10th Annual Irish Economics, Psychology, and Policy Conference
UCD Geary Institute
December 1st 2017
We will host the 10th annual Irish economics and psychology conference in UCD Geary Institute on Friday December 1st. Our keynote speakers will be Professor Don Ross (UCC) and Professor Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington (LSE). Those who wish to register to attend can do so at this link. For the first time, we will also host an early career conference the day before aimed at PhD students and early stage researchers in other agencies. Details of that event are available here Attendees registered for the December 1st event are also welcome to attend the PhD session.
Preliminary Programme:
9am - 915am: Coffee and Welcome
Michael Daly (UCD & Stirling): "Self-Control and Decision Making"
Maureen Maloney (NUIG): "Evaluating the framing effects of written pension communications: case study evidence" (with A. McCarthy).
Till Weber (UCD): “A Cross-Societal Comparison of Cooperative Dispositions and Norm Enforcement.”
1030 to 11am Coffee
Pete Lunn (ESRI): "Many Years From Now: Measuring Misperception and Misunderstanding of Pensions".
Leonhard Lades (EnvEcon & UCD): "Self-Control in Everyday Life"
Keynote 1: Don Ross (UCC): "Do People Bundle Sequences of Choices? An Experimental Investigation"
1pm - 145pm: Lunch
Dave Comerford (Stirling): "Animal Spirits and Political Animals: The Affect Heuristic Explains Partisan Differences in Investor Behavior".
Áine Ní Choisdealbha (ESRI): "Effects of efficiency information and emissions charges on consumer car preferences”.
345 to 4pm Coffee
Keynote 2: Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington (LSE): 'Decision-making up against the wall: How socioeconomic status shapes basic psychological processes'
Congratulations to Professor Richard Thaler who was announced as the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday. Linked here is a piece I wrote for the Sunday Business Post on his contribution to Economics (pre-edited text and some more links below).
Richard Thaler, 2017 Nobel Laureate in Economics
Richard Thaler was recently named as the 2017 Nobel laureate in Economics. Thaler is responsible for a shift in mainstream economics towards more psychological realism in modelling consumer and investor behaviour. He has spent the bulk of his career at the University of Chicago and is seen as the leading figure in the discipline known as behavioural economics.
Thaler's ideas are relevant to many areas of public policy in Ireland, in particular pensions. Along with his colleague Benartzi, Thaler designed and evaluated a pension participation scheme called Save More Tomorrow, where people sign up to a pension that starts with zero contributions and then progressively increases along with their salary increases. This type of "auto-escalation" is based on two key human decision making factors studied by Thaler - loss aversion whereby people do not want to part with income they have grown accustomed to, and myopia whereby present losses are felt to a far greater extent than future losses. Save More Tomorrow turns these biases on their head and has proven a remarkable way of countering many of the human factors that lead people to under-save.
Thaler has also written a great deal about how decision biases leave people open to influence from marketing techniques, and the implications of this work is at the core of a lot of modern regulatory debate. With this in mind, along with Cass Sunstein, Thaler has sought to develop the policy, legal, and regulatory implications of behavioural economics. Their popular book Nudge advocates a widespread reform of policy and regulation around principles of using psychologically-informed interventions to "unstick" markets and enable people to make more empowered decisions. The ideas in this book have led to agencies being formed throughout the world, most notably the UK Behavioural Insights team that was established in the Cabinet Office during the Conservative and LibDem coalition administration. As well as niche teams like this, the work has also had an increasing influence on regulation, in particular in light of the financial crisis, and has also come to be more influential in the design of policies across areas such as health, education, and development.
There are several ways that the ideas coming from Thaler and colleagues' work could potentially improve policy in Ireland, including making pension policy more robust to low levels of active decision making, substantially simplifying compliance with administrative requirements, protecting consumers more from exploitative marketing, putting in place safeguards in investment organisations to guard against herding and related biases, and many other policy initiatives. Agencies such as DPER, Department of Finance, Revenue Commissioners, and the Central Bank have published work on this area in the last number of years. The ESRI Pricelab led by Pete Lunn has conducted a wide range of studies on the implications of behavioural economics for regulation. The potential introduction of pension autoenrolment in Ireland comes directly from the behavioural literature and most regulators and government departments are developing capacities to apply behavioural evidence.
Thaler's work on policy is based around a number of core academic ideas. His most famous early papers examined phenomena such as mental accounting, whereby people partition their budgets into separate psychological pockets, something that affects their behaviour in many different ways. For example, people tend to be more likely to spend windfall amounts on luxuries, something that is intuitive psychologically but not accounted for in standard models. One of his most cited early papers also looked at the implications of limited self-control for consumer decision making, including the extent to which people might prefer to "tie their hands" to overcome the tendency to be present-biased.
His collaboration with the previous Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman built on previous Nobel-winning work by Kahneman and Tverksy and sought to understand how people evaluate gains and losses differently. This research has generally shown that people value losses to a far greater extent, something that has substantial implications for investment and consumption. The related idea of an endowment effect, namely that people tend to place more value on things they already own rather than gains they could make by speculating, has been used to explain phenomena such as low levels of switching in consumer markets and the tendency for well-being to be more influenced by income decreases than by income increases.
Throughout the 1990s, Thaler was at the vanguard of a group of scholars that sought to broaden the psychological foundations of economics, away from the dominant models of rational choice. He was by no means the first to do this. Indeed, previous Nobel winners include Amartya Sen, Herbert Simon, Maurice Allais, and Kahneman himself, all of whom pushed back against the assumptions of rationality and self-interested behaviour inherent in textbook economic models. However, it is clear that nobody was more successful than Thaler in gaining acceptance of psychologically-informed models across many areas of economics. As well as those mentioned above, his contributions stretch across many areas of economics and finance including studies examining why stock markets tend to overreact to news, how fairness acts as a constraint on choice and markets, and how pension decisions are made.
In terms of learning more about his ideas and why they are important for policy and business, Thaler's recent book Misbehaving is an accessible and personal account of his role in the development of behavioural economics. Nudge, referred to above, describes his and Sunstein's ideas for applying behavioural research to real-world problems of policy and business. While already a popular set of ideas, the award of the Nobel to Thaler is likely to substantially further accelerate the degree of interest in applications in this area internationally.
Liam Delaney is Professor of Economics at UCD and directs the MSc programme in Behavioural Economics.
Links:
This blogpost by Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution contains many useful links to Thaler's work and why he was awarded the prize.
Students in our undergraduate and postgraduate behavioural economics modules will already have encountered Thaler's work in a number of places, and will come across it more later in the semester as we examine behavioural law and regulation.
Thaler's major collaborator on law, regulation, and public policy, Cass Sunstein, will speak here in Dublin on November 10th - details here.
The UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy is pleased to announce our PhD Student Conference in Behavioural Science for 2017 in collaboration with the Stirling University Management School. This continues two successful annual events held at Stirling. For information about last year's PhD conference click here. The PhD conference will be held at University College Dublin on November 30th and will be followed by the 10th annual Irish economics and psychology conference on December 1st. Attendees to the PhD conference on November 30th are also welcome to attend the December 1 workshop. Please sign up separately for the workshop. Our keynote speakers will be Professor Don Ross (UCC) and Professor Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington (LSE).
1. Victoria Taranu (Hasselt University) on "Experimental study on alternative information framings of the flemish energy performance certificate" (with Griet Verbeeck).
2. Vlada Pleshcheva (Humboldt University Berlin) on "Do consumers value qualitatively identical improvements in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of cars equally?"
Session 1b: Media use
3. Veelaiporn Promwichit (University of Edinburgh) on "Can social media sentiment predict futures returns?" (with Arman Eshraghi and Ronan Gallagher)
4. Kevin Momanyi (University of Aberdeen) on "An econometric analysis of the impact of telecare" (with Paul McNamee and Diane Skatun)
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-13:00: Session 2
Session 2a: Locus of control
5. Juliane Hennecke (Free University Berlin) on "Controlled by politics? - Economic situation, locus of control and political participation"
6. Malte Preuss (Free University Berlin) on "Biased by success and failure: How unemployment shapes stated locus of control" (with Juliane Hennecke)
Session 2b: Decision Making 1
7. Luis Enrique Loria (University of Aberdeen) on "Current experience matters: Evidence from a reference dependent Discrete Choice Experiment design" (with Verity Watson, Takahiko Kiso, and Euan Phimister)
8. Mishal Ahmed (Georgia Institute of Technology) on "Quality provision with salient thinkers"
13:00-14:00: Lunch Break 14:00-15:30: Session 3 Session 3a: Mental Health and Work
9. Klavs Ciprikis (Dublin Institute of Technology) on "The impact of mental disorders on wages in the United Kingdom: An empirical analysis"
10. Victoria Mousteri (Stirling University) on "Hours-underemployment and psychological health: Evidence from Britain" (with Liam Delaney and Michael Daly)
11. Kate Isherwood (Bangor University) on “Looking forwards to work: Motivational and cognitive interventions to promote wellbeing, productivity and economic activity in the workforce.” (with John Parkinson, Gareth Harvey, and Andrew Goodman)
Session 3b: Decision Making 2
12. Abu Siddique (University of Southampton) on "Competitive preferences and ethnicity: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh" (with Michael Vlassopoulos)
13. Féidhlim McGowan (ESRI) on "Representation or reproduction? Lay understanding of probability distributions and willingness to take bets" (with Pete Lunn)
14. Terry McElvaney (ESRI) on “Complexity in car finance: Assessing limitations in consumer comprehension of personal contract plans (with Pete Lunn and Féidhlim McGowan)
15. Caroline Wehner (Maastricht University and IZA) on "Personality and educational achievement: The role of emotional stability and conscientiousness" (with Trudie Schils)
16. Emmanuel Igwe (Greenwich University) on “A study on attitudes into postgraduate education” (with Gabriella Cagliesi and Denise Hawkes)
17. Kenneth Devine (Central Bank of Ireland) on "Risky Business: New Insights into Mortgage Choice and Risk Preferences."
Session 4b: Subjective Well-Being
18. Robert Murphy (Stirling and Department of Health) on "Does informing members of the general population of the impact of aspects of health on patients’ life satisfaction and day affect change their judgements of health?"
19. Rhi Willmot (Bangor University) on “The Role of Positive Psychology in Physical Wellbeing” (with John Parkinson)
For questions, please contact Liam Delaney (liam.delaney@ucd.ie) or Leonhard Lades (leonhard.lades@ucd.ie)
Professor Till Grüne-Yanoff will deliver a public lecture to the Irish Behavioural Science and Policy Network on Wednesday 18th October at 6pm. There will be a wide-ranging Q+A session following the talk which will conclude at 7.30pm. The venue is the Royal Irish Academy. He will speak on behavioural economics and public policy, in particular on the role of policy in "boosting" ability to make good decisions under a variety of circumstances. The webpage to register for the event is available here.
Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions
Ralph Hertwig and Till Grüne-Yanoff
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Abstract
In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions.
Biography:
Till Grüne-Yanoff is professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.
His research focuses on the philosophy of science and on decision theory. In particular, he investigates the practice of modelling in science and engineering, develops formal models of preference consistency and preference change and discusses the evaluation of evidence in policy decision making. Click here for his Google Scholar page.
Till is editor of the journal Economics & Philosophy. He is also a member of the TINT Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Science in Helsinki, and a regular guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development.
He lives with his wife and his two children in the beautiful Vasastan neighborhood of Stockholm.
