Psychological and sociological factors constrain economic decision-making in many contexts including the online world. Behavioural economics and economic psychology emphasise that people will make mistakes in processing information and in planning for the future; these mistakes will also distort learning processes. Emotions and visceral factors will play a key role not only affecting people’s a...

The objective of this study was to relate behaviour change mechanisms to nutritionally relevant behaviour and demonstrate how the different mechanisms can affect attempts to change these behaviours. Folate was used as an example to illuminate the possibilities and challenges in inducing behaviour change. The behaviours affecting folate intake were recognised and categorised. Behaviour change me...

This is an attempt to tell a coherent story of a possible path towards an algorithmic revolution in economic theory, based on foundational debates in mathematics. First, by exposing the non-computational content of classical mathematics, and its foundations, it is shown that both set theory and the tertium non datur can be dispensed with, as foundational concepts. Next, then, as a natural seque...

The puzzle of the emergence of cooperation between unrelated individuals is shared across diverse fields of behavioural sciences and economics. In this article we combine the public goods game originating in economics with evolutionary approaches traditionally used in biology. Instead of pairwise encounters, we consider the more complex case of groups of three interacting individuals. We show t...

Asubstantial literature in behavioural science and psychology shows that emotions affect human choices and values. This paper investigates whether such emotional impacts are also present in stated choice experiments for environmental goods. If this were so, it would introduce an additional element of context dependence to the welfare measures derived from such methods, and would be at odds with...

Why do we often want things we do not need, and need things we do not want? This paper reviews the very core process of human psyche and the associated biases that make us what we are not: Homo economicus. It also proposes the many ways public policies could be redesigned – based on the recent findings in behavioural economics – in order to change the way people behave in an optimal way so that...

Most insights of environmental economics are in line with the standard neoclassical economic model of rational behaviour, formulated in terms of maximization of utility in general, or profits in particular. The standard theory of environmental policy is a case in point. However, the maximization hypothesis and its methodological foundation have been criticized on many grounds, related to a lack...

Social contexts can have dramatic effects on decisions. When individuals recognize each other as coming from the same social group, they can coordinate their actions towards a common goal. Conversely, information about group differences can lead to conflicts both economic and physical. Understanding how social information shapes decision processes is now a core goal both of behavioural economic...

Existing theories of behaviour change in psychology and behavioural economics rely mostly on changing cognitions and incentives as a route to altering behavioural responses. We propose a more general reflective-automatic model (RAM), which postulates that, in addition to cognitive change, interventions can also rely exclusively on contextual change as an alternative route to behaviour change. R...