With the ongoing rollout of smart meters in Ireland, time-of-use (ToU) tariffs are currently being introduced as a new way to pay for electricity. Such tariffs can bring important benefits to both consumers and society, in terms of reduced electricity bills and CO2 emissions, respectively. At...

Social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic will save lives. We tested communication strategies to promote social distancing via an online experiment (N = 500) commissioned by Ireland's Department of Health. A control group saw a current informational poster. Two treatment groups saw similar...

Encouraging consumers to seek out and switch to lower-rate mortgages is important both for the individual consumer's finances and for functioning competitive markets, but switching rates are low. We conducted an experiment with mortgage-holders to test whether official advice on how to select...

This paper critically examines initial applications of Behavioural Economics (BE) to policymaking. It focuses primarily but not exclusively on what can be learnt from the early adopters of policies inspired by BE, notably America and Britain. BE is defined by its inductive scientific approach to...

This paper argues that telecommunications markets present the consumer with a decision-making environment that is particularly likely to be prone to established biases in consumer decision-making. The analysis identifies four properties of telecommunications markets, which in combination are...

This paper considers Ireland's banking crisis from the perspective of behavioural economics. It assesses whether known biases in judgement and decision-making were instrumental in the development and severity of the crisis. It investigates evidence that key decision-makers, including consumers,...

This paper challenges the increasingly common view that the findings of behavioural economics constitute a fourth type of market failure. The market failure framework elevates the standard competitive market model to the status of an ideal. It provides us with tools to identify departures from...

Over the past five years, behavioural economics has been rapidly propelled from the margins of economic analysis towards the policy mainstream. In this context, this study offers an international review of the initial applications of behavioural economics to policy, with a particular focus on...

We hypothesise and confirm a previously unnoticed pattern within pre-existing data on the endowment effect, collected via seven experiments employing the original design. Subjects with low valuations in binary choice relative to other subjects set a proportionally higher willingness to accept....