Abstract Naturalistic monitoring tools provide detailed information about people's behaviours and experiences in everyday life. Most naturalistic monitoring research has focused on measuring subjective well-being. This paper discusses how naturalistic monitoring can inform behavioural public policy-making by providing detailed information about everyday decisions and the choice architecture in which these decisions are made. We describe how the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) – a naturalistic monitoring tool popular in the subjective well-being literature – can be used to: (i) improve ecological validity of behavioural economics; (ii) provide mechanistic evidence of the everyday workings of behavioural interventions; and (iii) help us to better understand people's true preferences. We believe that DRM data on everyday life have great potential to support the design and evaluation of behavioural policies.
Piracy in international waters is on the rise again, in particular off the coast of Somalia. While the dynamic game between pirates, ship-owners, insurance firms and the military seems to have reached some kind of equilibrium, piracy risks generating significant negative externalities to third parties (e.g. in terms of environmental hazards and terrorism), justifying attempts to contain it. We argue that these attempts may benefit from a look back – through the analytical lens of rational choice theory – to the most successful counterpiracy campaign ever undertaken, namely, the one led by the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) in 67 BC.
Recent experimental evidence suggests that donors are averse to giving to charities with high overhead ratios. This paper asks whether donors are also averse to giving to charities spending a high share of the donations on unavoidable administrative expenses. The results of an experiment with a nationally representative sample (n = 1, 032) suggest that donors dislike paying for administrative burden almost as much as for overhead. While donors care primarily about how much of their donations are used for program-related services, donors seem to have a weak preference for charities to spend their donations on administrative burden rather than on overheads. Government subsidies that help alleviate charities’ administrative burden can reduce donors’ aversion to give to charities with high administrative expenses. Overall, we show that regulations that aim to increase transparency and accountability in the charity sector can have the unintended side effect of reducing charitable giving.
Behavioural scientists have begun to research sludge, excessive frictions that make it harder for people to do what they want to do. Friction is also an important concept in transaction-cost economics. Nevertheless, sludge has been discussed without explicit referral to transaction costs. Several questions arise from this observation. Is the analogy to friction used differently in both literatures? If so, what are the key differences? If not, should we develop the concept of sludge when the well-established literature on transaction costs already exists? This paper shows that sludge and transaction costs are related, but distinct concepts, and that the literature on sludge can benefit from incorporating elements from transaction-cost research. For example, we suggest defining sludge as aspects of the choice architecture that lead to the experience of excessive or unjustified costs, organise sludges using a typology inspired by the transaction-cost literature and show that sludge audits can be conducted using methods developed in the transaction-cost literature.
In many countries around the world, significant proportions of consumers report intentions to reduce their meat consumption. If followed through on, the intentions of these meat reducers could yield substantial environmental, health and animal welfare benefits. Existing research warns, however, that good intentions often go astray. In the current study, we examine the prevalence of intentions to reduce meat consumption in a representative sample of 1492 UK residents. We then investigate the situational correlates of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption among a group of 633 people with intentions to reduce their intake in a longitudinal survey involving event reconstruction exercises. Through these exercises, we collect data on the objective situational cues and psychological situational characteristics that predict when this group desired, ate and regretted eating meat during 2777 meal episodes. The results indicate that situational factors are predictive of the range of outcomes of interest. Situations that lend themselves to hedonic, rather than instrumental style, consumption, (e.g., non-routine meals, when the situation is perceived as being pleasant and when taste and craving are important decision factors), eating outside the home in cafés and restaurants and over at family or friend's homes and eating in the presence of others who are eating meat when are particularly predictive of intention-behaviour gaps. The findings highlight the need for intervention work which targets these situations to help meat reducers act as they intend.
The paper deals with impulsive consumption and highlights the roles that cognitive and motivational aspects of reflexive thought (namely self-control and self-image motives, respectively) play in intertemporal decisions. While self-control inhibits individuals from consuming impulsively, self-image motives can induce impulsive consumption. Based on recent neuroscientific findings about 'wanting'–'liking' dissociations, the paper presents a potential motivational mechanism underlying such impulsive consumption decisions. Utilizing the knowledge of this mechanism and acknowledging both cognitive and motivational aspects of reflexive thought, the paper expands on three libertarian paternalistic means to foster an ethical way of impulsive consumption: strengthening willpower, reducing impulsive desires to consume, and guiding impulsive behavior in ethical directions by making salient certain self-images that favor ethical consumption.
The model of time-inconsistent procrastination by O'Donoughe and Rabin shows that individuals who are not aware of their present-bias (naive) procrastinate more than individuals who are aware of it (sophisticated) or are not present-biased (time-consistent). This paper tests this prediction. We classify participants into types using a novel measure, and require them to perform a real-effort task on one out of three dates. We find that sophisticated participants perform the task significantly later than naive participants. Our data suggest that this result may be explained by habit formation.
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