Module 12 Where Next?

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein&s;s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness will likely continue to stimulate academic research in a diverse set of disciplines. It is a standard reference text on university courses in behavioral economics and has been cited by thousands of papers and reports. In the long term, the most significant contributions of Nudge may be its promotion of two norms of science-based policy-making. The first is that policy-makers should use the best available science to design their interventions. This may mean using more than just the ideas in Nudge , which only suggests a relatively narrow spectrum of intervention types constrained by the principles of behavioral economics and libertarian paternalism. The second norm is that policymakers should consistently test the effectiveness of their interventions using gold-standard scientific methods like randomized controlled trials, or a method used in the social sciences to determine the effectiveness of an intervention (RCTs).

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