Motor vehicle fuel-economy standards have long been a cornerstone of U.S. policy to reduce fuel consumption in the light-duty vehicle fleet. In 2011 and 2012 these standards were significantly expanded in an effort to achieve steep reductions in oil demand and greenhouse gas emissions through...

The regulatory state has become a cost-benefit state, in the sense that under prevailing executive orders, agencies must catalogue the costs and benefits of regulations before issuing them, and in general, must show that their benefits justify their costs. Agencies have well-established tools...

Disclosure mandates are pervasive. Though designed to inform consumers, such mandates may lead consumers to draw false inferences – for example, that a product is harmful when it is not. When deciding to require disclosure of an ingredient in or characteristic of a product, regulators may be...

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions - possibilities that go well beyond, and that may supplement or complement, the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose...

Policy-makers show an increasing interest in “nudges” – behaviorally motivated interventions that steer people in certain directions but maintain freedom of consumer choice. Despite this interest, little evidence has surfaced about which population groups support nudges and nudging. We...

How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold? Do human beings optimize, or can they? Several decades of research have shown that people possess a toolkit of heuristics to make decisions under...

In the past decade, policymakers have increasingly used behaviourally informed policies, including “nudges,” to produce desirable social outcomes. But do people actually endorse those policies? This study reports on nationally representative surveys in five countries (Belgium, Denmark,...