Social Welfare and Behavioral Public Policies

Abstract

The topic of this book is related to the rising field of behavioral public policymaking. Scholars belonging to this movement propose policy interventions that address systematic and predictable violations of rationality to steer agents' behavior in directions that are self-beneficial, possibly without limiting individual autonomy or restricting freedom of choice. The intuition at the basis of behavioral public policies is that humans are characterized by limited cognitive abilities and their choices are often in uenced by details not included in models of standard decision-making. Therefore, the policy analyst that is able to identify, explain and predict nonstandard behavioral regularities could make use of this knowledge to promote welfare-improving policies. The interest surrounding behavioral public policies comes from the fact that its proposals are easy to implement, relatively cheap and in many cases respectful of individual freedom of choice. This book proposes a detailed introduction to behavioral public policymaking and three original contributions.