There is no mention of Maurice Allais, for instance, who arguably designed the first empirical experiments in behavioural economics. It is an American (and American-based Israeli) centric book.
Rather, it is a personal intellectual history, supplemented by stories, anecdotes and occasional reposts to past combatants. And I would question whether this is a book that outlines the making of behavioural economics. Thaler, arguably the world’s leading behavioural economist and one of its early pioneers, perhaps feels as though his career has been a 40-year odyssey of misbehaving in relation to the mainstream economics community, but given that he has devoted himself to the study of how people actually make, rather than ought to make, decisions, one could make a case for deleting ‘Mis’ from the front of the title.
I begin this review of Richard Thaler’s new book with a gripe, or rather a double gripe, about its title. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics. This program also belies the frequent claim, unsupported by any evidence, that nudges must be secret to be effective.Reviewer Adam Oliver finds that Richard Thaler’s new book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, covers the core concepts of behavioural economics, but finds that this book is more a ‘personal intellectual history, supplemented by stories, anecdotes and occasional reposts to past combatants’ that misses two important issues ‘relating to suggestions for the future development of behavioural economics’.
Afterward, both parents and students said they wanted to stick with the program, showing that they appreciated being nudged. These children gained the equivalent of two additional months of schooling, relative to the control group. The pre-informing texts increased student performance on the math test by the equivalent of one additional month of schooling, and students in the bottom quartile benefited most. The researchers call this approach “pre-informing.” The other half of parents did not receive the texts. This intervention involved sending texts to half the parents in some school in advance of a major math test to let them know that their child had a test coming up in five days, then in three days, then in one day. “A third positive result even further from the traditional tool kit of financial incentives comes from a recent randomized control trial conducted in the U.K., using the increasingly popular and low-cost method of text reminders.
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