Behavioral Insights for Policy Design

This textbook is an introductory guide to applying behavioral sciences and systemic thinking into public policy design and implementation. It presents an innovative public management toolkit to handle ‘wicked’ social problems – those not very responsive to traditional public policy instruments – by incorporating insights from the behavioral sciences and systemic design in the diagnostics of public problems, based on the motivations and constraints of the ‘real citizen’ – beyond the ideal citizen’s perfectly rational intentions and plans devoid of social context or self-control problems.

This volume aims to motivate the inclusion of broader and deeper insights from the behavioral sciences – especially behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology – to the repertoire of public managers by introducing new methodologies for diagnosing the root causes behind public problems and for designing effective policies to address them. The new diagnosis tool – theMSI framework (an acronym for Motivation, Self-control, and Inattention problems) –, will help identify new mechanisms underlying social problems or reinterpret known problems based on behavioral insights. The new methodology for policy design – the PRIx framework (an acronym for Pricing policies, Regulatory policies, and Information policies) –, will enrich existing policy tools with such behavioral insights.

Behavioral Insights for Policy Design: A New Framework for Understanding Wicked Social Problems and Designing Policies for Real Citizens will be a useful and practical guide to public managers and students of graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in public management interested in learning how to apply innovative tools and methodologies inspired by the behavioral sciences into public policy design in a simple and practical way, even when dealing with complex social problems.