De overheid als keuzearchitect? - Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het ...

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public policy nudges: the government as choice architect knob. Which is better than chance, but only slightly. Compare that to the stove on the other picture, where we have not even labeled the knobs but no one would ever make a mistake. So we have a good design and a bad design. Our point is: why not choose good designs? Which brings me to the most famous Dutch contribution to choice architecture. Now for the ladies in the audience, this represents your best chance at seeing the inside of the men’s toilet at Schiphol airport. You can see that there is something in there. I actually made sure that these flies were still there yesterday when I arrived at the airport. Now this was an innovation introduced by a former economist. I think this may be the best thing economists have ever done. The idea is that when men are ‘taking care of business’, they aren’t paying very much attention to the task at hand. But if you give them a target, they will aim. According to the people at Schiphol airport, spillage has been reduced by 80 per cent. Now that fly has become my best example of a nudge. 13 So what is a nudge? A nudge is some small feature of the environment that attracts our attention and influences our behavior. It is important to stress that nudges work on humans but not on econs. So econs choose optically without nudges but humans sometimes need a nudge. We have a chapter on the principles of good choice architecture. I do not have time to talk about all of them today, so let me give some examples of the first three principles. The first is default. We have heard that the default option today is to speak Dutch, which I am opting out of. Normally, a default option is just what happens if you do nothing. So normally what happens if you do nothing is that nothing happens. But sometimes for example you walk away from your computer and if you go long enough, the screen saver comes on or the computer locks itself. How long that takes, is itself a default option that came on your computer, and most people never change it. The most important point about default options is that they are sticky. So whoever chooses the default options has a lot of power. Let me give two examples of this. The first we have lots and lots of data about. In the us we have for the last 25 years been switching over from a system of defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans,
de ov er heid a l s k eu z e a rchi t ec t known as 41k plans. The employee has to join the plan and decide how much to save and how to invest the money. Some employees never get around to joining. Now a simple solution to that is to change the default. So under the usual regime when you are first eligible to join the plan, you get a big pile of forms to fill out and if you do not fill them out you are not in. What some firms have done is switch to automatic enrollment. You get that first pile of forms, but the first page <strong>als</strong>o says: if you do not fill this out we are going to enroll you at this savings level and this investment plan. Now this greatly speeds enrollment, but there is a downside: whatever the default options are, specifically the savings rate and the investment vehicle, those get sticky. 14 I am going to talk about a solution to that in a minute. Let me give you another example with respect to organ donations. In many countries, including the us and the Netherlands, if you want to make your organs available if you should die, you have to do something, sign some form. Countries are varied in how difficult it is to find that form and turn it in. Some European countries have adopted what is called ‘presumed consent.’ This flips the default. You are assumed to give your consent unless you opt out. Spain is the world’s leader in producing organs that are available for donation and one of the methods they use is presumed consent. That has some appeal, although some people object to this politically. I actually favor a third option, neither opt in nor opt out, but what I call ‘mandated choice’. It is actually the system we use in Illinois, where I live. The way it works in Illinois is that every few years you have to get your drivers’ license renewed and get your picture taken. When you do this, they ask you: do you want to be a donor yes or no? You must answer that question to get your drivers’ license. So you can say no. You are free to say no, but you can’t just say: huhhhhh, I don’t know. This has increased the proportion of people who agree to give their organs to 68 per cent. Nationwide in the us it’s 38 per cent. This costs nothing. I wrote a column about this in the New York Times a couple months ago and I mentioned that Steve Jobs had recently received the liver transplant. I suggested that our goal should be to make it as easy to sign up to donate your organs as it is to download an app on an iPhone. I nudged Steve Jobs to make an app available on the iPhone for the people to sign up. Jobs didn’t
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