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 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...

Two laboratory studies investigated the effect of price transparency on consumers' decision-making in the residential electricity market. The first tested whether consumers have difficulties when confronted with unit prices expressed as discounts from standard rates, which vary between...

Despite ongoing efforts by regulatory authorities, there is significant noncompliance with the EU Nitrates Directive among farms in Ireland. Nutrient pollution harms water quality and ecosystems, and farms are subject to fines for noncompliance. This paper examines reasons for noncompliance and...

Identifying whether hyperbolic advertising claims influence consumers is important for consumer protection, but differentiating mere "puffery" from misleading advertising is not straightforward. We conducted a pre-registered experiment to determine whether pseudo-technical advertising claims...

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...