B Douglas Bernheim
Biographic Data
| ID | 1040833 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Douglas Bernheim |
| GIVEN NAMES | B Douglas |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernheim |
| SIGNATURE | BERNHEIM B D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6483-7622 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 375 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Exploring how “risk” can be conceptualised and addressed to overcome barriers to implementing family-led innovations in child protection social work
ApproachThis paper presents the findings of a realist synthesis of data from an implementation evaluation. The evaluation focused on the introduction of a family-led way of carrying out child protection decision-making based on Family Group Conferences in seven English Local Authorities.PurposeThe impact of risk-aversion and professional anxiety in child protection social work in the UK has been the subject of research and practice reviews for th…
Family‐Led Decision‐Making Meetings as an Alternative to Initial Child Protection Conferences
Safeguarding Family Group Conferencing (FGC) is a family‐led decision‐making process offered to some families in England as an alternative to an Initial Child Protection Conference when Children's Services have safeguarding concerns. A realist evaluation was conducted within three local authorities piloting this approach to build understanding around how Safeguarding FGC works in relation to desired outcomes. Qualitative data including semi‐struc…
The power and potential of space and place in family group conferencing
Family Group Conferencing is a family-led decision-making process used in children’s social care in the UK. Unlike traditional meetings between families and professionals when there is a safeguarding concern, Family Group Conferences are often held outside children’s services’ premises in a ‘neutral’ venue. In this article, we critique the idea that a meeting location can be neutral as spaces may be experienced differently, and hold multiple mean…
Peer Advice on Financial Decisions
We investigate the impact of peer interaction on the quality of financial decision making in a laboratory experiment. Face-to-face communication with a randomly assigned peer significantly improves the quality of subsequent private decisions even though simple mimicry would have the opposite effect. We present evidence that the mechanism involves general conceptual learning (because the benefits of communication extend to previously unseen tasks)…
Applying a realist evaluation to an intervention in children’s social care
Children’s social care researchers are increasingly drawing on realist evaluation to understand the complexity within their field by identifying underlying contexts and mechanisms that lead to outcomes of interest. However, there are few published worked examples of realist evaluations of interventions in children’s social care. This makes it challenging to understand how to put this approach to best use in practice. To address this gap, we share…
What Is a Mistake? Guardrails for Behavioral Public Policy
Findings from behavioral economics and psychology potentially identify expanded paternalistic roles for government. There is an urgent need for clear conceptual guardrails that spell out empirically verifiable conditions under which these paternalistic interventions may be justified. This article advocates a framework that defines mistakes only as errors in two components of decision-making: characterization and optimization . It also discusses e…
The influence of gender on young women’s everyday (im)mobilities in Inverness, Scotland
Young women's (im)mobilities are influenced by a web of factors at the individual, interpersonal and macro levels of analysis.These factors, including young women's social identities, perceptions of themselves and their environment; parental rules; transportation systems; and systematic inequalities, influence how, at what times and where young women access the public realm.In this article, I argue gender is an often-hidden but significant force …
When Fair Isn’t Fair
In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness. Subjects in an experiment most commonly select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante and switch to the ex post fair alternative ex post. One potential explanation embraces consequentialism and construes reversals as time inconsistent. Another abandons consequentialism in favor of deontological (rule-based) ethics and thereby avoids the implication that re…
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This paper discusses the ways in which behavioral economics challenges the premises of conventional welfare economics. It proposes revised premises that survive those challenges and sets forth a welfare framework derived from that foundation. It argues that the proposed framework is practical, in the sense that it lends itself to applications, as well as unifying, in the sense that it subsumes other approaches and illuminates the relationships be…
Emmanuel Saez
Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, has distinguished himself by making fundamental contributions concerning critical theoretical and empirical issues within the field of public economics. He is one of those exceptional scholars whose work reflects a broad and thoroughly integrated vision. In carefully and creatively implementing that vision, he has led a remarkable resurgence of interest in tax policy research over the last…
Beyond Revealed Preference
Interest in behavioral economics has grown in recent years, stimulated largely by accumu-lating evidence that the standard model of consumer decision-making provides an inadequate positive description of human behavior. Behavioral models are increasingly finding there way into policy evaluation, which inevitably involves welfare analysis. The welfare issues raised by behavioral economics have received much less attention than the positive issues.…
Memory and Anticipation
The introduction of memory imperfections into models of economic decision making creates a natural role for anticipatory emotions. Their combination has striking behavioural implications. The paper first shows that agents can rationally select apparently dominated strategies. We consider Newcomb's Paradox and the Prisoners' Dilemma. We provide a resolution for Newcomb's Paradox and argue it requires the decision maker to ascribe only a tiny weigh…
Addiction and Cue-Triggered Decision Processes
We propose a model of addiction based on three premises: (i) use among addicts is frequently a mistake; (ii) experience sensitizes an individual to environmental cues that trigger mistaken usage; (iii) addicts understand and manage their susceptibilities. We argue that these premises find support in evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and clinical practice. The model is tractable and generates a plausible mapping between behavior and the char…
Bequests as Signals
In the United States, more than two-thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children. In contrast, gifts given before death are usually unequal. These findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of intergenerational transfers. In this paper, we develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle based on the notion that the division of bequests provides a signal…
Education and saving
Exclusive Dealing
In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of exclusive dealing, and we explore the motivations for and effects of its use. For a broad class of models, we characterize the outcome of a contracting game in which manufacturers may employ exclusive dealing provisions in their contracts. We then apply this characterization to a sequence of specialized settings. We demonstrate that exclusionary contractual provi…
A Theory of Conformity
This paper analyzes a model in which individuals care about both consumption (intrinsic utility) and social status. Status depends on public perceptions about an individual's predispositions rather than on the individual's actions. However, since predispositions are unobservable, actions signal predispositions and therefore affect status. When status is sufficiently important relative to intrinsic utility, many individuals conform to a rigid stan…
How Strong Are Bequest Motives? Evidence Based on Estimates of the Demand for Life Insurance and Annuities
This paper presents new empirical evidence in support of the view that a significant fraction of total saving is motivated solely by the desire to leave bequests. Specifically, I find that Social Security annuity benefits significantly raise life insurance holdings and depress private annuity holdings among elderly individuals. These patterns indicate that the typical household would choose to maintain a positive fraction of its resources in bequ…
A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits
Generally speaking, there are three schools of thought concerning the economic effects of budget deficits: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Ricardian. It is remarkable that from among these three schools of thought, one can find support for every conceivable normative position. Whether one thinks of deficits as good, bad, or irrelevant therefore depends fundamentally on one's choice of a paradigm. Certainly, no single paradigm corresponds exactly to …
Is Everything Neutral
In this paper, the authors critique the assumption on which Robert J. Barro's dynastic model is predicated and a rgue that this framework is not a suitable abstraction in contexts in which the objective is to analyze the effects of public policies. Th ey formally consider a world in which each generation consists of man y distinct individuals and show that family linkages form complex net works, in which each individual may belong to many dynasti…
Coalition-Proof Nash Equilibria I. Concepts
Menu Auctions, Resource Allocation, and Economic Influence
In many examples of competitive bidding (e.g., government construction contracting) the relevant object is either partially divisible or ill-defined, in contrast to much of the recent theoretical work on auctions. In this paper we consider a more general class of auctions, in which bidders name a “menu” of offers for various possible actions (allocations) available to the auctioneer. We focus upon “first-price” menu auctions under the assumption …
Common Agency
The Strategic Bequest Motive
Rationalizable Strategic Behavior
This paper examines the nature of rational choice in strategic games.Although there are many reasons why an agent might select a Nash equilibrium strategy in a particular game, rationality alone does not require him to do so.A natural extension of widely accepted axioms for rational choice under uncertainty to strategic environments generates an alternative class of strategies, labelled "rationalizable."It is argued that no rationalizable strateg…
The Strategic Bequest Motive
A Theory of Conformity
This paper analyzes a model in which individuals care about both consumption (intrinsic utility) and social status. Status depends on public perceptions about an individual's predispositions rather than on the individual's actions. However, since predispositions are unobservable, actions signal predispositions and therefore affect status. When status is sufficiently important relative to intrinsic utility, many individuals conform to a rigid stan…
Bequests as Signals
In the United States, more than two-thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children. In contrast, gifts given before death are usually unequal. These findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of intergenerational transfers. In this paper, we develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle based on the notion that the division of bequests provides a signal…
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This paper discusses the ways in which behavioral economics challenges the premises of conventional welfare economics. It proposes revised premises that survive those challenges and sets forth a welfare framework derived from that foundation. It argues that the proposed framework is practical, in the sense that it lends itself to applications, as well as unifying, in the sense that it subsumes other approaches and illuminates the relationships be…
How Strong Are Bequest Motives? Evidence Based on Estimates of the Demand for Life Insurance and Annuities
This paper presents new empirical evidence in support of the view that a significant fraction of total saving is motivated solely by the desire to leave bequests. Specifically, I find that Social Security annuity benefits significantly raise life insurance holdings and depress private annuity holdings among elderly individuals. These patterns indicate that the typical household would choose to maintain a positive fraction of its resources in bequ…
Exclusive Dealing
In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of exclusive dealing, and we explore the motivations for and effects of its use. For a broad class of models, we characterize the outcome of a contracting game in which manufacturers may employ exclusive dealing provisions in their contracts. We then apply this characterization to a sequence of specialized settings. We demonstrate that exclusionary contractual provi…
When Fair Isn’t Fair
In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness. Subjects in an experiment most commonly select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante and switch to the ex post fair alternative ex post. One potential explanation embraces consequentialism and construes reversals as time inconsistent. Another abandons consequentialism in favor of deontological (rule-based) ethics and thereby avoids the implication that re…
Memory and Anticipation
The introduction of memory imperfections into models of economic decision making creates a natural role for anticipatory emotions. Their combination has striking behavioural implications. The paper first shows that agents can rationally select apparently dominated strategies. We consider Newcomb's Paradox and the Prisoners' Dilemma. We provide a resolution for Newcomb's Paradox and argue it requires the decision maker to ascribe only a tiny weigh…
Applying a realist evaluation to an intervention in children’s social care
Children’s social care researchers are increasingly drawing on realist evaluation to understand the complexity within their field by identifying underlying contexts and mechanisms that lead to outcomes of interest. However, there are few published worked examples of realist evaluations of interventions in children’s social care. This makes it challenging to understand how to put this approach to best use in practice. To address this gap, we share…
A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits
Generally speaking, there are three schools of thought concerning the economic effects of budget deficits: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Ricardian. It is remarkable that from among these three schools of thought, one can find support for every conceivable normative position. Whether one thinks of deficits as good, bad, or irrelevant therefore depends fundamentally on one's choice of a paradigm. Certainly, no single paradigm corresponds exactly to …
What Is a Mistake? Guardrails for Behavioral Public Policy
Findings from behavioral economics and psychology potentially identify expanded paternalistic roles for government. There is an urgent need for clear conceptual guardrails that spell out empirically verifiable conditions under which these paternalistic interventions may be justified. This article advocates a framework that defines mistakes only as errors in two components of decision-making: characterization and optimization . It also discusses e…
The influence of gender on young women’s everyday (im)mobilities in Inverness, Scotland
Young women's (im)mobilities are influenced by a web of factors at the individual, interpersonal and macro levels of analysis.These factors, including young women's social identities, perceptions of themselves and their environment; parental rules; transportation systems; and systematic inequalities, influence how, at what times and where young women access the public realm.In this article, I argue gender is an often-hidden but significant force …
Rationalizable Strategic Behavior
This paper examines the nature of rational choice in strategic games.Although there are many reasons why an agent might select a Nash equilibrium strategy in a particular game, rationality alone does not require him to do so.A natural extension of widely accepted axioms for rational choice under uncertainty to strategic environments generates an alternative class of strategies, labelled "rationalizable."It is argued that no rationalizable strateg…
The Strategic Bequest Motive
Menu Auctions, Resource Allocation, and Economic Influence
In many examples of competitive bidding (e.g., government construction contracting) the relevant object is either partially divisible or ill-defined, in contrast to much of the recent theoretical work on auctions. In this paper we consider a more general class of auctions, in which bidders name a “menu” of offers for various possible actions (allocations) available to the auctioneer. We focus upon “first-price” menu auctions under the assumption …
Common Agency
Coalition-Proof Nash Equilibria I. Concepts
Is Everything Neutral
In this paper, the authors critique the assumption on which Robert J. Barro's dynastic model is predicated and a rgue that this framework is not a suitable abstraction in contexts in which the objective is to analyze the effects of public policies. Th ey formally consider a world in which each generation consists of man y distinct individuals and show that family linkages form complex net works, in which each individual may belong to many dynasti…
A Neoclassical Perspective on Budget Deficits
Generally speaking, there are three schools of thought concerning the economic effects of budget deficits: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Ricardian. It is remarkable that from among these three schools of thought, one can find support for every conceivable normative position. Whether one thinks of deficits as good, bad, or irrelevant therefore depends fundamentally on one's choice of a paradigm. Certainly, no single paradigm corresponds exactly to …
How Strong Are Bequest Motives? Evidence Based on Estimates of the Demand for Life Insurance and Annuities
This paper presents new empirical evidence in support of the view that a significant fraction of total saving is motivated solely by the desire to leave bequests. Specifically, I find that Social Security annuity benefits significantly raise life insurance holdings and depress private annuity holdings among elderly individuals. These patterns indicate that the typical household would choose to maintain a positive fraction of its resources in bequ…
A Theory of Conformity
This paper analyzes a model in which individuals care about both consumption (intrinsic utility) and social status. Status depends on public perceptions about an individual's predispositions rather than on the individual's actions. However, since predispositions are unobservable, actions signal predispositions and therefore affect status. When status is sufficiently important relative to intrinsic utility, many individuals conform to a rigid stan…
Exclusive Dealing
In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of exclusive dealing, and we explore the motivations for and effects of its use. For a broad class of models, we characterize the outcome of a contracting game in which manufacturers may employ exclusive dealing provisions in their contracts. We then apply this characterization to a sequence of specialized settings. We demonstrate that exclusionary contractual provi…
Education and saving
Bequests as Signals
In the United States, more than two-thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children. In contrast, gifts given before death are usually unequal. These findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of intergenerational transfers. In this paper, we develop a theory that accounts for this puzzle based on the notion that the division of bequests provides a signal…
Addiction and Cue-Triggered Decision Processes
We propose a model of addiction based on three premises: (i) use among addicts is frequently a mistake; (ii) experience sensitizes an individual to environmental cues that trigger mistaken usage; (iii) addicts understand and manage their susceptibilities. We argue that these premises find support in evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and clinical practice. The model is tractable and generates a plausible mapping between behavior and the char…
Memory and Anticipation
The introduction of memory imperfections into models of economic decision making creates a natural role for anticipatory emotions. Their combination has striking behavioural implications. The paper first shows that agents can rationally select apparently dominated strategies. We consider Newcomb's Paradox and the Prisoners' Dilemma. We provide a resolution for Newcomb's Paradox and argue it requires the decision maker to ascribe only a tiny weigh…
Beyond Revealed Preference
Interest in behavioral economics has grown in recent years, stimulated largely by accumu-lating evidence that the standard model of consumer decision-making provides an inadequate positive description of human behavior. Behavioral models are increasingly finding there way into policy evaluation, which inevitably involves welfare analysis. The welfare issues raised by behavioral economics have received much less attention than the positive issues.…
Emmanuel Saez
Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, has distinguished himself by making fundamental contributions concerning critical theoretical and empirical issues within the field of public economics. He is one of those exceptional scholars whose work reflects a broad and thoroughly integrated vision. In carefully and creatively implementing that vision, he has led a remarkable resurgence of interest in tax policy research over the last…
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This paper discusses the ways in which behavioral economics challenges the premises of conventional welfare economics. It proposes revised premises that survive those challenges and sets forth a welfare framework derived from that foundation. It argues that the proposed framework is practical, in the sense that it lends itself to applications, as well as unifying, in the sense that it subsumes other approaches and illuminates the relationships be…
When Fair Isn’t Fair
In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness. Subjects in an experiment most commonly select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante and switch to the ex post fair alternative ex post. One potential explanation embraces consequentialism and construes reversals as time inconsistent. Another abandons consequentialism in favor of deontological (rule-based) ethics and thereby avoids the implication that re…
The influence of gender on young women’s everyday (im)mobilities in Inverness, Scotland
Young women's (im)mobilities are influenced by a web of factors at the individual, interpersonal and macro levels of analysis.These factors, including young women's social identities, perceptions of themselves and their environment; parental rules; transportation systems; and systematic inequalities, influence how, at what times and where young women access the public realm.In this article, I argue gender is an often-hidden but significant force …
The power and potential of space and place in family group conferencing
Family Group Conferencing is a family-led decision-making process used in children’s social care in the UK. Unlike traditional meetings between families and professionals when there is a safeguarding concern, Family Group Conferences are often held outside children’s services’ premises in a ‘neutral’ venue. In this article, we critique the idea that a meeting location can be neutral as spaces may be experienced differently, and hold multiple mean…
Peer Advice on Financial Decisions
We investigate the impact of peer interaction on the quality of financial decision making in a laboratory experiment. Face-to-face communication with a randomly assigned peer significantly improves the quality of subsequent private decisions even though simple mimicry would have the opposite effect. We present evidence that the mechanism involves general conceptual learning (because the benefits of communication extend to previously unseen tasks)…
Applying a realist evaluation to an intervention in children’s social care
Children’s social care researchers are increasingly drawing on realist evaluation to understand the complexity within their field by identifying underlying contexts and mechanisms that lead to outcomes of interest. However, there are few published worked examples of realist evaluations of interventions in children’s social care. This makes it challenging to understand how to put this approach to best use in practice. To address this gap, we share…
What Is a Mistake? Guardrails for Behavioral Public Policy
Findings from behavioral economics and psychology potentially identify expanded paternalistic roles for government. There is an urgent need for clear conceptual guardrails that spell out empirically verifiable conditions under which these paternalistic interventions may be justified. This article advocates a framework that defines mistakes only as errors in two components of decision-making: characterization and optimization . It also discusses e…
Exploring how “risk” can be conceptualised and addressed to overcome barriers to implementing family-led innovations in child protection social work
ApproachThis paper presents the findings of a realist synthesis of data from an implementation evaluation. The evaluation focused on the introduction of a family-led way of carrying out child protection decision-making based on Family Group Conferences in seven English Local Authorities.PurposeThe impact of risk-aversion and professional anxiety in child protection social work in the UK has been the subject of research and practice reviews for th…
Family‐Led Decision‐Making Meetings as an Alternative to Initial Child Protection Conferences
Safeguarding Family Group Conferencing (FGC) is a family‐led decision‐making process offered to some families in England as an alternative to an Initial Child Protection Conference when Children's Services have safeguarding concerns. A realist evaluation was conducted within three local authorities piloting this approach to build understanding around how Safeguarding FGC works in relation to desired outcomes. Qualitative data including semi‐struc…
Economics (17 works) · Political science (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Business (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Microeconomics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Economic theories and models (6 works) · Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis (6 works) · Law (6 works)