Richard H Thaler - Misbehaving- The Making of Behavioral Economics (epub)

Econs are already doing the right thing. Nudges are supposedly irrelevant factors
that influence our choices in ways that make us better off. The fly further made
clear to me that while Cass and I were capable of recognizing good nudges when
we came across them, we were still missing an organizing principle for how to
devise effective nudges.
We had a breakthrough in finding our missing organizing principle when I
reread Don Norman’s classic book The Design of Everyday Things. The book
has one of the best covers I have ever seen. It is an image of a teapot that has
both the handle and the spout on the same side. Think about it. After rereading
Norman’s book, I realized we could apply many of his principles to the problems
we were studying. I had recently bought my first iPhone, a device so easy to use
that it didn’t need an instruction manual. What if we could design policies that
were equally easy to create “user-centered” choice environments? At some point
we adopted the term “choice architecture” to describe what we were trying to do.
In curious ways, simply having that phrase to organize our thoughts helped us
create a checklist of principles for good choice architecture, with many of the
ideas borrowed from the human design literature. Designing good public policies
has a lot in common with designing any consumer product.
Now that we had our new set of tools, one big choice we had to make was
which policy issues to try to address with them. Some topics that we had already
written about were easy, but others required us to dig into the literature and see
whether we could come up with anything useful or interesting. Some of these
investigations led to dead ends. We drafted a chapter on Hurricane Katrina but
cut it because we only found one remotely interesting idea, and it was not ours.
John Tierney, a columnist for the New York Times, had a suggestion to encourage
people to leave for higher ground before a storm strikes. Tierney’s idea was to
offer those who opt to stay a permanent ink marker and suggest they use it to
write their Social Security number on their body, to aid in the identification of
victims after the storm. We had nothing nearly as good as that.
In other cases, the research caused us to change our views on some subject. A
good example of this is organ donations. When we made our list of topics, this
was one of the first on the list because we knew of a paper that Eric Johnson had
written with Daniel Goldstein on the powerful effect of default options in this
domain. Most countries adopt some version of an opt-in policy, whereby donors
have to take some positive step such as filling in a form in order to have their
name added to the donor registry list. However, some countries in Europe, such
as Spain, have adopted an opt-out strategy that is called “presumed consent.”
You are presumed to give your permission to have your organs harvested unless
you explicitly take the option to opt out and put your name on a list of “non-