Providing timely nudges to students has been shown improve engagement and persistence in tertiary education. However, many studies focus on small-scale pilots rather than institution-wide initiatives. This article assesses the impact of a pan-institution Early Alert System at University Canterbury that utilises nudging when are risk disengagement. Once flagged, received an automated text messag...

There has been very little research to test whether ambiguity affects individuals’decisions to insure themselves against the catastrophic effects of climate change. This paper attempts to study how individuals respond to the availability of an insurance that would give them immunity to a climate change catastrophe. Moreover, if such an insurance is available to them, do they insure themselves s...

Why has the word “plausible” come to define federal civil litigation? In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court supplemented longstanding pleading standards under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which require a “short and plain statement of the claim,”1 to additionally require that all civil pleadings state a claim that is “plausible.”2 In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, the Court rejected ...

Smartphone usage has evolved in people’s lives from necessity to habit and in some cases leading to compulsive use and addiction. However, only a little research has been performed on the prevention of Problematic Smartphone Usage (PSU). Behavioral economics has been applied to investigate how smartphone users respond to nudges that try to lower their smartphone usage. Findings revealed that th...

When productivity is fostered by an individual’s own human capital as well as by the economy-wide average level of human capital, individuals under-invest in human capital. The provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital, conditional on the subsidy being self-financed by tax revenues, can bring the economy to its socially optimal level of human capital. Yet a strictly positive pro...

Users of computing systems and devices frequently make decisions related to information security, e. g., when choosing a password, deciding whether to log into an unfamiliar wireless network. Employers or other stakeholders may have a preference for certain outcomes, without being able to or having a desire to enforce a particular decision. In such situations, systems may build in design nudges...

People are faced with numerous decisions every day. Whether we must choose our outfit for the day, which cell phone brand to buy, what college to attend, to buy a car or house insurance, or even when or to whom to get married, decisions are a permanent presence in our daily activities. Behavioral economics is a multi-disciplinary field of study investigating how people make judgments and decisi...

Nudge presumes that decision-making is guided by intuitive biases and heavily influenced the environment in which choices are made. However, critics argue place of quick thinking envisaged nudge behaviour change reflects deeper broader thought processes. One these patterns – fatalism has been identified across health allied disciplines as key to explaining reason why many people ignore authorit...

We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an “evaluation nudge,” in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus on individual performance in joint than in separate evaluation and on group stereotypes in separate than in joint evaluation, making joint eva...