Our use or rather overuse of natural resources is having an increasingly drastic and adverse effect on the environment. Behavioural economics uses the concepts and elements of psychology and applies them in economic decision-making. It has been identified that behavioural economics can be used to tackle the issue of climate change by using ‘nudges’ to influence people to make choices that are more eco-friendly. Behavioural economics also accept the presence of cognitive biases in the decision-making process, and one solution to reduce the biases is instigating ‘nudges’ that increase the probability of making optimal decisions. The book therefore provides an in-depth understanding of the environmental and climatic issues and the role played by people’s psychology in addressing them. The book highlights cognitive biases and nudges that can be used to negate or reduce the negative impact of decision-making on the environment. The book provides a detailed explanation of the topic along with illustrations, tables, and case studies that make it easy to understand and apply the concepts. The methods, results, and topics covered in the book will be of particular interest to readers interested in behavioural economics, sustainable development, environmental conservation, and various biases that impact decision-making and the nudges that are used and can be used to bring environment protection. The main benefit that readers will derive from the book is a comprehensive understanding of behaviour, biases and nudge-based solutions and their potential to address major challenges faced while making decisions. The book is helpful for policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and students interested in behavioural economics, biases, sustainable development, and environmental protection.

The definitive introduction to the behavioral insights approach, which applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems. Our behavior is strongly influenced by factors that lie outside our conscious awareness, although we tend to underestimate the power of this “automatic” side of our behavior. As a result, governments make ineffective policies, businesses create bad products, and individuals make unrealistic plans. In contrast, the behavioral insights approach applies evidence about actual human behavior—rather than assumptions about it—to practical problems. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, written by two leading experts in the field, offers an accessible introduction to behavioral insights, describing core features, origins, and practical examples. These insights have opened up new ways of addressing some of the biggest challenges faced by societies, changing the way that governments, businesses, and nonprofits work in the process. This book shows how the approach is grounded in a concern with practical problems, the use of evidence about human behavior to address those problems, and experimentation to evaluate the impact of the solutions. It gives an overview of the approach's origins in psychology and behavioral economics, its early adoption by the UK's pioneering “nudge unit,” and its recent expansion into new areas. The book also provides examples from across different policy areas and guidance on how to run a behavioral insights project. Finally, the book outlines the limitations and ethical implications of the approach, and what the future holds for this fast-moving area.

This Handbook compiles the state of the art of current research on sustainable consumption from the world�s leading experts in the field. The implementation of sustainable consumption presents one of the greatest challenges and opportunities we are fac

What is the answer to inspiring sustainable behaviour? It starts with a question – or nineteen. With this simple and inspiring guide you'll learn how to ask for persistent, pervasive, and near-costless change by uncovering our hidden quirks, judgmental biases, and apparent irrationalities. The only change you'll need to make is how you ask. Businesses, larger or small, will soon have to cut costs and cut carbon, irrespective of the products they sell, or the services they perform. National government has structural policy and legislative needs, and local government has implementation and documentation needs. Indeed, the new UK government coalition’s approach to transport is simply ‘cut costs and cut carbon’. Set against this there is an increasing sense that popular culture and popular science are congregating around a desire to understand who we are and how we behave. The recent rise of behavioural economics is a testament to this as well as the relevance of environmental psychology. Allied to this is a sense that big business is forging ahead with plans to account for and mitigate carbon emissions without the marketing and communications departments being able to help or communicate this effectively either through their own efforts or those of their communication agencies. The ‘19 Different Ways to Ask for Change’ offer a solution to all these needs by pulling them together and showing that changing how we ask is near-costless, but its effects could be near-priceless. This book shows that simplification isn’t always the solution, an action can be the most successful question, and a default answer can be the most important. It explores why short-term memory tasks change our behaviour, how singing roads regulate speed, and that commitment gaps change outcomes; how our worry-profile is the same as an Argentinean farmer's, why knowledge of what kills you is irrelevant but asking about behaviour that kills is deadly, and what a chimpanzee’s tea-party tells us about the effect of ownership on decision-making. This timely book will be of great value to scholars and practitioners whose work relates to reducing carbon emissions with a particular emphasis on environmental psychology, behavioural economics, project design, and psychology. It offers practical solutions for policy makers and professionals in marketing and communications departments.

The Community of Advantage asks how economists should do normative analysis. Normative analysis in economics has usually aimed at satisfying individuals' preferences. Its conclusions have supported a long- standing liberal tradition of economics that values economic freedom and views markets favourably. However, behavioural research shows that individuals' preferences, as revealed in choices, are often unstable, and vary according to contextual factors that seem irrelevant for welfare. Robert Sugden proposes a reformulation of normative economics that is compatible with what is now known about the psychology of choice. The growing consensus in favour of paternalism and 'nudging' is based on a very different way of reconciling normative economics with behavioural findings. This is to assume that people have well-defined 'latent' preferences which, because of psychologically-induced errors, are not always revealed in actual choices. The economist's job is then to reconstruct latent preferences and to design policies to satisfy them. Challenging this consensus, The Community of Advantage argues that latent preference and error are psychologically ungrounded concepts, and that economics needs to be more radical in giving up rationality assumptions. Sugden advocates a kind of normative economics that does not use the concept of preference. Its recommendations are addressed, not to an imagined 'social planner', but to citizens, viewed as potential parties to mutually beneficial agreements. Its normative criterion is the provision of opportunities for individuals to participate in voluntary transactions. Using this approach, Sugden reconstructs many of the normative conclusions of the liberal tradition. He argues that a well-functioning market economy is an institution that individuals have reason to value, whether or not their preferences satisfy conventional axioms of rationality, and that individuals' motivations in such an economy can be cooperative rather than self-interested.

Behavioural sciences help refine our understanding of human decision-making. Their insights are immensely relevant for policy-making since public intervention works much better when it targets real people rather than imaginary beings assumed to be perfectly rational. Increasingly, governments around the world are keen to rely on those insights for reshaping public interventions in a wide range of policy areas such as energy, health, financial services and data protection. When policy-making meets behavioural sciences, effective and low-cost regulations can emerge in the form of default rules, smart disclosure and simplification requirements. While behaviourally-informed intervention has a huge potential for policymaking, it also attracts legitimacy and practicability concerns. Nudge and the Law takes a European perspective on those issues and explores the legal implications of the emergent phenomenon of behavioural regulation by focusing on the challenges and opportunities it may offer to EU policy-making and beyond.