Behavioral Public Policy and Economics GmbH
The 27th of November 2024 marked a milestone for Riyadh as the Riyadh Metro opened its first lanes, starting a new era of public transportation in the city. The metro has the potential to transform urban mobility, reduce congestion, and enhance the quality of life for residents.
In the world of (applied) science we often focus heavily on how to get the research design, data collection, and analysis right. There are plenty of guides on specific methods with which we can gain powerful insights. But we often pay less attention to the last step of our research project: Turning the collected data into actionable knowledge. Decision makers do not only need to understand what the results are, but also what they mean: what can we learn from the data? Are our initial questions answered? What are the next steps to take?
Customer journey mapping is a widely used tool for both commercial and non-commercial sectors to help organizations optimize processes, generate insights, and eventually improve the customer experience. In a nutshell, the exercise involves breaking down the customer journey into stages, each stage detailing the points of interaction between the organization and the customer. At each of these points, we list the actions and emotions of the customer, the process owners/stakeholders, challenges, and opportunities, among other things.
In 2012, Microsoft nearly missed on a huge profitable opportunity if an engineer had not tested a new way of displaying ads on Bing in a controlled experiment – an A/B test. The best performing version created a 12% boost in revenues, amounting to about $100 million additional revenues for Bing each year (HBR 2017).
Imagine your livelihood and that of your neighbors depends on a common resource that replenishes itself naturally. As a community, you learned over time, with a high degree of certainty, the replenishment cycle and were able through social norms and customs to share the common resource. Recently, however, the replenishment cycle rapidly became unpredictable and you, as everyone else, became uncertain about your share. Read More
Resisting temptation can be a real struggle. Self-control problems are life-long companions to many people who often find it hard to adopt better eating or exercise habits, or to stick to other plans they have set for themselves. In turn, the ability to exert self-control helps people achieve their long-term goals.
Have you ever day-dreamed about winning the lottery? You can almost see yourself being happy until the end of your days, spending great holidays in paradisiac beaches while at the same time investing your money wisely to prosper. And what about if you got dismissed from your job for professional misconduct? You would not have time to feel sad or concerned – you’d apply to two or three amazing positions and would certainly get two (or even three!) offers.
A lot of behavioral interventions are expressly designed to be salient, that is, to grab your attention at the time and place where the desired action is made. Many safety campaigns around the world have been using this technique to reduce traffic accidents by displaying “sobering” messages on billboards. The widely held belief is that those messages can motivate drivers to drive more carefully.
It is estimated that billions of dollars in government benefits, which are important for reducing rising income inequality and fostering well-being, are forgone annually in the US by millions of people who are eligible for them. Among other reasons, this participation gap can be due to a lack of awareness, the complexity of the process, or the discomfort around asking for financial help.
The use of auto-renewals in free-trial offers, which seek to lure us into entering a long term subscription, has been exploding recently. But are these offers really successful in changing our subscription behaviors? Or are we gradually becoming suspicious and eventually immune toward them?