Policy and Choice: Public Finance through the Lens of Behavioral Economics

Notes

209 Notes Chapter One 1. See Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Joshua Schwartzstein, “Insuring the Health of Behavioral Consumers,” unpublished paper (2010), for an analysis of the issues in this section. 2. Box 4-2 in chapter 4 discusses some examples of such behavior. For example, there is some evidence of framing effects in health behaviors: Daniel J. O’Keefe and Jakob D. Jensen, “The Relative Persuasiveness of Gain-Framed and Loss-Framed Messages for Encouraging Disease Detection Behaviors: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of Communication, vol. 59, no. 2 (2009), pp. 296–316. Another example finds evidence of status quo bias over treatment options: Haiden A. Huskamp and others, “The Impact of a Three-Tier Formulary on Demand Response for Prescription Drugs,” Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, vol. 14, no. 3 (2005), pp. 729–53. 3. It also suggests a different form of overuse, one that comes from psychological overweighting of benefits rather than from a gap in price. 4. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). 5. Raj Chetty, Adam Looney, and Kory Kroft, “Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence ,” American Economic Review, vol. 99, no. 4 (2009), pp. 1145–77. 6. Hunt Allcott and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Behavior and Energy Policy,” Science, vol. 327, no. 5970 (March 5, 2010), pp. 1204–05. 7. Jonathan Gruber and Botond Koszegi, “Tax Incidence When Individuals Are TimeInconsistent : The Case of Cigarette Excise Taxes,” Journal of Public Economics, vol. 88, no. 9–10 (2004), pp. 1959–87. 8. B. Douglas Bernheim and Antonio Rangel, “Behavioral Public Economics: Welfare and Policy Analysis with Nonstandard Decision-Makers,” in Behavioral Economics and Its Applications, edited by Peter Diamond and Hannu Vartianen (Princeton University Press, 2007); B. Douglas Bernheim and Antonio Rangel, “Beyond Revealed Preference: Choice09 -0498-0 notes.indd 209 1/3/11 3:31 PM 210 notes to pages 9–22 Theoretic Foundations for Behavioral Welfare Economics,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 124, no. 1 (February 2009), pp. 51–104. 9. Esther Duflo and others, “Saving Incentives for Low- and Middle-Income Families: Evidence from a Field Experiment with H&R Block,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 121, no. 4 (2006), pp. 1311–46. 10. Eric P. Bettinger and others, “The Role of Simplification and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA Experiment,” Working Paper 15361 (Cambridge , Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2009). 11. Jeffrey Kling and others, “Misperception in Choosing Medicare Drug Plans,” unpublished paper (2008). 12. Bruce D. Meyer, “Lessons from the U.S. Unemployment Insurance Experiments,” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 33, no. 1 (March 1995), pp. 91–131. 13. Ibid. 14. Justine S. Hastings and Jeffrey M. Weinstein, “Information, School Choice, and Academic Achievement: Evidence from Two Experiments,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 123, no. 4 (2008), pp. 1373–1414. Chapter Two 1. Matthew Rabin, “Psychology and Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 36, no. 1 (1998), pp. 11–46; Sendhil Mullainathan and Richard Thaler, “Behavioral Economics,” in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2001), pp. 1094–1100; Daniel Kahneman, “Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics,” American Economic Review, vol. 93, no. 5 (2003), pp. 1449–75; Colin F. Camerer, “Behavioral Economics,” in Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, Ninth World Congress, vol. 2, edited by Richard Blundell, Whitney K. Newey, and Torsten Persson (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 181–214; Stefano DellaVigna, “Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field,” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 47, no. 2 (2009), pp. 315–72. 2. Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 79, no. 6 (2000), pp. 995–1006. 3. Sheena S. Iyengar, Gur Huberman, and Wei Jiang, “How Much Choice Is Too Much? Contributions to 401(k) Retirement Plans,” in Pension Design and Structure: New Lessons from Behavioral Finance, edited by Olivia S. Mitchell and Steve Utkus (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 83–95. 4. Robyn A. LeBoeuf and Eldar Shafir, “Decision Making,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, edited by Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 243–65. 5. Daniel Kahneman, Attention and Effort (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973); Harold Pashler, Attention (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis Press, 1998); Harold Pashler, James C. Johnston, and Eric Ruthruff, “Attention and...