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WHY BEHAVIOURAL POLICY NEEDS MECHANISTIC EVIDENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2015

Till Grüne-Yanoff
Till Grüne-Yanoff*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Brinellvägen 32, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: [email protected]. URL: http://people.kth.se/~gryne/
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Abstract:

Proponents of behavioural policies seek to justify them as ‘evidence-based’. Yet they typically fail to show through which mechanisms these policies operate. This paper shows – at the hand of examples from economics and psychology – that without sufficient mechanistic evidence, one often cannot determine whether a given policy in its target environment will be effective, robust, persistent or welfare-improving. Because these properties are important for justification, policies that lack sufficient support from mechanistic evidence should not be called ‘evidence-based’.

Keywords

PolicyMechanismsNudgeEvidenceWelfare
Type
Articles
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 463 - 483
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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