Behavioral Economics: A Primer and Applications to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Good Health and Well-Being
Open Access
- 4 June 2021
- Vol. 4 (2), 16
- https://doi.org/10.3390/reports4020016
Abstract
Behavioral economics (BE) is a relatively new field within economics that incorporates insights from psychology that can be harnessed to improve economic decision making with the potential to enhance good health and well-being of individuals and societies, the third of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. While some of the psychological principles of economic decision making were described as far back as the 1700s by Adam Smith, BE emerged as a discipline in the 1970s with the groundbreaking work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. We describe the basic concepts of BE, heuristics (decision-making shortcuts) and their associated biases, and the BE strategies framing, incentives, and economic nudging to overcome these biases. We survey the literature to identify how BE techniques have been employed to improve individual choice (focusing on childhood obesity), health policy, and patient and healthcare provider decision making. Additionally, we discuss how these BE-based efforts to improve health-related decision making can lead to sustaining good health and well-being and identify additional health-related areas that may benefit from including principles of BE in decision making.Keywords
This publication has 78 references indexed in Scilit:
- Increasing Consumption of Fruits and Vegetables in the School Cafeteria: The Influence of Active ChoiceJournal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 2013
- Healthy convenience: nudging students toward healthier choices in the lunchroomJournal of Public Health, 2012
- When and Why Incentives (Don't) Work to Modify BehaviorJournal of Economic Perspectives, 2011
- Smoking initiation among youth: The role of cigarette excise taxes and prices by race/ethnicity and genderJournal of Health Economics, 2011
- The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened BeveragesThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2009
- Like Parent, Like ChildArchives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 2008
- Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happinessConstitutional Political Economy, 2008
- Consumer Health Information Seeking as Hypothesis TestingJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2008
- Five pitfalls in decisions about diagnosis and prescribingBMJ, 2005
- Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and BiasesScience, 1974