Frontiers in Behavioral Economics | New and Recent Articles

Policymakers often rely on simple quantitative indicators to navigate complex policy environments, yet these indicators frequently become targets that distort the very processes they are meant to monitor. Drawing on Campbell's Law ( 1979)) and two cognitive biases—availability heuristic and attribute substitution—this interpretive case study of Quebec's education policy examines the consequences …

Digital public services must control fraud, error, and consequential mistakes without excluding legitimate users. Existing reasonableness, proportionality, sludge audit, screening, and digital-burden approaches identify relevant principles but do not specify how incomplete evidence about one friction should change its operational status. This conceptual analysis develops behavioral risk–friction …

IntroductionEmotions are widely recognized as influencing financial decision-making under uncertainty, yet it remains unclear whether pre-trading emotional predispositions are associated primarily with investment performance or with the way investors engage with the market. This study examines whether positive and negative pre-trading emotional predispositions are more closely associated with por…

IntroductionMarried working women in the UAE increasingly live at a distance from extended family, whose caregiving and emotional support functions they can no longer draw on.MethodsFifteen married working women in Abu Dhabi and Dubai were interviewed and analysed via six-phase thematic analysis, guided by Social Support Theory and Role Strain Theory.ResultsFour themes emerged: sustained emotiona…

Kenya's informal sector remains excluded from formal trade due to fragmented regulation, complex standards, and the significant expansion of digital marketplaces. Drawing on market data, legislative review, and reputable literature, we identify regulatory gaps that impede compliance by informal Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), as well as significant behavioural obstacles, including e…

Behavioral economics has transformed public policy by identifying how cognitive limitations and biases systematically distort individual decisions. Yet the field's dominant tools, nudges that target cognitive heuristics and choice architecture, leave a powerful behavioral mechanism largely unaddressed: affect (good-bad feelings). In the domains where behavioral public policy is most urgently need…

We trust strangers every day. Deciding to trust another depends on the social and legal environments that influence calculative trust as well as unconsciously processed neural signals. Unenforceable communication (“cheap talk”) has been shown to increase cooperative behaviors, but why it does this is not well-understood. Herein we test whether physiologic synchrony during pre-decision communicati…

PurposeIn an era marked by heightened market volatility and growing investor responsibility, understanding the psychological determinants of sound investment behaviour has become increasingly important. This study examines how emotional intelligence (EI) shapes investment performance (IP), with overconfidence bias (OB) and self-regulation (SR) acting as mediators and financial literacy (FL) servi…

Round, just-below (e.g., 9.99), and precise (e.g., 9.87) prices are widespread in consumer markets, yet evidence on their psychological effects remains inconclusive, at times even contradictory, and heavily concentrated on the contrast between just-below and round prices. Recent work further shows that these price endings differ systematically in their prevalence across countries, underscoring th…

Out-of-pocket health care spending is an inefficient and inequitable financing mechanism, as it reduces household well-being and can push families into poverty. This study estimates the impoverishment associated with out-of-pocket health care expenditures in Peru between 2010 and 2021 and identifies the factors associated with such impoverishment. Using microdata from the National Household Surve…

Women's entrepreneurship is central to the functioning of agri-food systems in sub-Saharan Africa, yet women-owned enterprises remain constrained by socio-cultural, structural, and financial barriers. This study examines how open-market systems shape opportunities and constraints for women entrepreneurs in agri-food businesses in Thyolo and Chiradzulu districts of Malawi. Rather than assuming lin…

IntroductionThis study examined how Filipino university students prioritize sportswear attributes and whether these preferences vary across sociodemographic groups within the context of Physical Activity Towards Health and Fitness courses (PATH-Fit). Framed within behavioral economics, the study treats sportswear purchasing as a form of everyday consumer decision-making shaped by functional need,…

IntroductionThe post-COVID-19 phenomenon of “quiet quitting” could be problematic for UK economic growth because unpaid overtime has been a key contributor to business productivity since the 2008 global financial crisis. Here, we explore the extent to which this phenomenon exists in the UK, and whether the tendency for quiet quitting differs across generations.MethodsWe analyzed data from the UK …

IntroductionHuman-machine interactions become increasingly pervasive in daily life and professional contexts, motivating research to examine how human behavior changes when individuals interact with machines rather than other humans. While most of the existing literature focused on human-machine interactions with algorithmic systems in advisory roles, research on human behavior in monitoring or v…

This article presents a pragmatic framework for time-sensitive analysis of behavioral RCTs using sequence methods and Markov modeling. The focus is not methodological novelty but translation: we map common policy questions to appropriate temporal tools, provide a reporting checklist for transparency, and show how estimates become implementable rules for booster timing, triage, and exit. We positi…

The concept of “Ecohesion” offers a novel perspective on sustainable transitions by emphasizing social cohesion as a central element. Drawing inspiration from Herbert Gintis's combination of macro social dynamics and micro behavioral evidence, this framework integrates his theories on the interplay between social norms, endogenous preferences, and institutional dynamics. By identifying four funda…

Hospitality and consumer environments are undoubtedly multisensory, yet auditory stimuli remain underutilized as intentional components of choice architecture. This mini-review synthesizes evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics examining how soundscapes—particularly micro-auditory cues such as door clicks and elevator tones—are undervalued in their functions as behaviora…

We test for gender effects in the “vote with your wallet” game, a multi- person version of the prisoner's dilemma that models responsible consump- tion decisions. We find that women cooperate significantly more (have more responsible consumption decisions) than men in the baseline version of the game. This baseline excludes three additional elements tested in companion treatments: i) a legality f…

This paper aims to assess the impact of cultural heritage on Greek economic development. An input-output model approach is used to estimate a set of multipliers that measure the direct, indirect and induced (broader) macroeconomic impact of income, output, value added and employment of cultural heritage on economic growth. The multipliers of product, gross value added, income and employment are c…