When patients with diabetes come to the doctor’s office, it is important for their clinicians to take a look at their feet. Many, if not most, foot amputations among people with diabetes would be prevented with this simple exam, an exam that will identify problems early enough to prevent them from progressing. But us busy…
The Financial Times, one of the great newspapers of the world, recently published a really nice essay exploring some of the controversies about what role, if any, behavioral economics should play in public policy. I’m going to give you a “teaser” of the article here, and you can always click on the link to read…
Check out this wonderful street art, that seconds as a behavioral intervention to reduce traffic speed: Very cool! (Click here to view comments)
You might think that the difference between a car that has been driven 49,999 miles and one that has been driven 50,001 miles is… 2 miles. But you would miss out on another big difference – in the price a buyer would be willing to pay for those two vehicles. Here’s a graph showing just…
Parole boards are supposed to objectively assess whether inmates eligible for parole deserve to be released from prison before the end of their sentence. They need to determine whether people are reformed, whether they have been behaving themselves in prison, and whether they pose unacceptable risks to society. But it turns out their decisions may…
I remember one time having a conversation with Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, about the topic of happiness and emotional adaptation, in the context of chronic disability. We were discussing emotional impact of experiencing a limb amputation. Kahneman pointed out that it is the loss of the limb that is really…
I teach a course on behavioral economics and public policy at Duke University. One of my former students recently emailed me a picture of a bill he received in the mail. It looks like conEdison is trying to remind him to pay his bills electronically, so they don’t have to send him a bill in…
People often show an amazing ability to emotionally recover from difficult circumstances. I devoted my second book, You’re Stronger Than You Think, to this topic. Now comes some really cool research, showing that people’s ability to bounce back from adversity depends, not all that surprisingly, on their underlying personality traits. Although this result is not…
Dick Thaler, an economist who helped create the field of behavioral economics, came up with a wonderful idea a long time ago to promote retirement savings, a plan he calls Save More Tomorrow. Among the many clever aspects of his plan is the idea of automatic escalation of people’s retirement contributions. Think of the idea…
In a recently published article, a team of researchers showed that a simple graphical cue, showing people which foods are healthy and unhealthy, significantly improve their eating behaviors. Here is a nice summary of the study results, as summarized on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website: With a problem as large as America’s obesity epidemic,…