A Political Economy of Behavioural Public Policy

"My aim in the Origins book was to outline the foundations and development of the relatively new subfield of behavioural public policy.2 Given that behavioural public policy is defined as the use of behavioural economics, and behavioural science more broadly, to inform public policy design, that book necessarily included a brief summary of the development of behavioural economics, and indeed of standard rational choice theory, also.3 In that vein, broadly speaking, the book considered two principal lines of inquiry: namely, the early challenges that questioned the descriptive validity of the axioms of expected utility theory (e.g. the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes), and the suggestion that people employ decision-making heuristics - which challenges the assumption that they maximise expected utility -"--