Is there a behavioral revolution in policy design? A new agenda and inventory of the behavioral toolbox

Abstract

Abstract The article argues for a revised research on behavioral public policy focused on the core claim and sine qua non of a behavioral “revolution”: the ability to produce equal or better outcomes with less stringent policy designs than in traditional solutions, at least for certain types of problems. Three contributions to such an agenda are proposed. First, the article argues that the growing focus on the evaluation of real-world behavioral policy programs, as opposed to experimental studies within specialized areas of research, calls for a corresponding theoretical orientation toward existing literature on policy tools and design. Second, a doctrine of policy design is extrapolated from the broader behavioral paradigm and specified in relation to four general areas of application. These provide an essential context for the evaluation of the behavioral claim to improved policy design and highlight that behavioral successes may well, contra this claim, be a result of a de facto increase in stringency vis-à-vis traditional responses. Third, the article proposes a new and substantially revised inventory of the behavioral toolbox, which specifies the stringency, mechanisms, and potential costs of different behavioral tools and techniques, which is both essential to the evaluation of the behavioral claim and necessary to overcome the arbitrariness and mistakes of existing inventories.