Review of "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness"

Review of the book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Book review: Noise: a flaw in human judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explore how ‘noise’ affects human judgment and reflect on what we can do to address this. This novel book will help readers to better understand the processes we undertake in decision-making and how to encourage more informed and principled decisions, writes Kaibalyapati Mishra. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. William Collins. 2021

Sunstein, Cass R.: Behavioral Science and Public Policy

Review of the book: Sunstein, Cass R.: Behavioral Science and Public Policy. Elements in Public Economics, Cambridge University Press.Recensión del libro de Sunstein, Cass R.: Behavioral Science and Public Policy. Elements in Public Economics, Cambridge University Press

Nudge-Proof: Distributive Justice and the Ethics of Nudging

A review of Cass R. Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science

Unmasking Judicial Extremism

Review of Cass R. Sunstein, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (2005

Unmasking Judicial Extremism

Review of Cass R. Sunstein, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (2005

Intergenerationalism and Constitutional Law

A Review of Constitutional Law by Geoffrey R. Stone, Louis M. Seidman, Cass R. Sunstein and Mark V. Tushnet and Constitutional Law: Cases -- Comments -- Questions by William B. Lockhart, Yale Kamisar, Jesse H. Choper, and Steven H. Shiffri

Sludge and Ordeals

Is there an argument for behaviorally informed deregulation? In 2015, the United States government imposed 9.78 billion hours of paperwork burdens on the American people. Many of these hours are best categorized as “sludge,” understood as friction, reducing access to important licenses, programs, and benefits. Because of the sheer costs of sludge, rational people are effectively denied life-changing goods and services. The problem is compounded by the existence of behavioral biases, including inertia, present bias, and unrealistic optimism. A serious deregulatory effort should be undertaken to reduce sludge through automatic enrollment, greatly simplified forms, and reminders. At the same time, sludge can promote legitimate goals. First, it can protect program integrity, which means that policymakers might have to make difficult tradeoffs between (1) granting benefits to people who are not entitled to them and (2) denying benefits to people who are entitled to them. Second, it can overcome impulsivity, recklessness, and self-control problems. Third, it can prevent intrusions on privacy. Fourth, it can serve as a rationing device, ensuring that benefits go to people who most need them. Fifth, it can help public officials to acquire valuable information, which they can use for important purposes. In most cases, however, these defenses of sludge turn out to be far more attractive in principle than in practice. For sludge, a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential, and it will often demonstrate the need for a neglected form of deregulation: sludge reduction. For both public and private institutions, “Sludge Audits” should become routine, and they should provide a foundation for behaviorally informed deregulation. Various suggestions are offered for new action by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the Paperwork Reduction Act; for courts; and for Congress

Willingness to Pay vs. Welfare

Economists often analyze questions of law and policy by reference to the criterion of private willingness to pay (WTP), with the belief that people's WTP for a good is an accurate proxy for the welfare that they would obtain from that good. For two reasons, the proxy is crude. The first problem is that people may not pay for all of the benefits they receive, and in such cases, use of WTP may lead in unfortunate directions, even or especially if welfare is our lodestar. The second and more fundamental problem is that people may be willing to pay for goods whose acquisition does not improve their welfare. People typically choose on the basis of their "affective forecasting," and their affective forecasts can lead them to make bad blunders. Sometimes people overestimate the welfare effects of both losses and gains. These points have many implications for law and policy. In particular, juries are probably offering greatly inflated dollar awards for hedonic damages, and the outcome of cost-benefit analyses, based on WTP, may not capture welfare, suitably defined.