Behavioral Economics

  • Read more: NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics
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    NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics

    This volume, edited by I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, and Christopher T. Robertson, stems from the Petrie-Flom Center’s 2014 Annual Conference “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” Pre-order your copy today! Behavioral nudges are everywhere: calorie counts on menus, automated text reminders to encourage medication adherence, a reminder bell when a driver’s seatbelt isn’t fastened. Designed to help…

  • Read more: Two Cheers for Corporate Experimentation
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    Two Cheers for Corporate Experimentation

    By Michelle Meyer I have a new law review article out, Two Cheers for Corporate Experimentation: The A/B Illusion and the Virtues of Data-Driven Innovation, arising out of last year’s terrific Silicon Flatirons annual tech/privacy conference at Colorado Law, the theme of which was “When Companies Study Their Customers.” This article builds on, but goes…

  • Read more: Bioethicist Art Caplan: Deep-Fat Fryers in Schools is Business, Not Freedom
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    Bioethicist Art Caplan: Deep-Fat Fryers in Schools is Business, Not Freedom

    By Arthur Caplan A new piece by contributor Art Caplan on NBC News: How bad is the obesity epidemic among kids in America? Bad enough that 69 percent of young adults in Minnesota cannot serve in the military due to obesity-related health problems, according to a recent report “Too Fat, Frail and Out-of-Breath to Fight,”…

  • Read more: Exploring The Significant State-To-State Variation In Marketplace Enrollment
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    Exploring The Significant State-To-State Variation In Marketplace Enrollment

    This new post by the Petrie-Flom Center’s Academic Fellow Matthew J. B. Lawrence appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015. What role did geography, advertising, community, Navigators, and the controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act…

  • Read more: Going for gold: behavioral science reveals new biases in ACA exchange shopping
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    Going for gold: behavioral science reveals new biases in ACA exchange shopping

    By Lauren Taylor A new New England Journal of Medicine commentary by Peter A. Ubel, M.D., David A. Comerford, Ph.D., and Eric Johnson, Ph.D. highlights significant flaws in the way information is presented to insurance shoppers on state and federal exchange websites. The authors present original survey data to support the argument that subtle aspects of…

  • Read more: Book Review Review: Sunstein’s “Valuing Life”
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    Book Review Review: Sunstein’s “Valuing Life”

    By Matthew Lawrence A couple weeks ago the Financial Times ran a book review (behind a pay wall) by Mark Vandevelde of Cass Sunstein’s “Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State” (linked here). The book review carries the tagline “Beware the paternalist in libertarian garb.” I happen to have read the book and, since the Financial…

  • Read more: Inaugural SG Global Chat: Harvard Effective Altruism Expanding to HSPH
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    Inaugural SG Global Chat: Harvard Effective Altruism Expanding to HSPH

    SG Global Chat Harvard Effective Altruism — Using Evidence and Reason to Maximize the Impact of Efforts to Make the World Better October 8, 2014 12:30-1:20pm, Kresge G-2 Harvard Effective Altruism (HEA) is a student group at Harvard College and Harvard Business School. The group is dedicated to spreading the ideas of effective altruism to…

  • Read more: Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE) at MIT Sloan
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    Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE) at MIT Sloan

    By Michelle N. Meyer Another stop on my fall Facebook/OKCupid tour: on October 10, I’ll be participating on a panel (previewed in the NYT here) on “Experimentation and Ethical Practice,” along with Harvard Law’s Jonathan Zittrain, Google chief economist Hal Varian, my fellow PersonalGenomes.org board member and start-up investor Ester Dyson, and my friend and…

  • Read more: Research Assistant III: Work with Professors Eyal, Hammitt, Freedberg, Kuritzkes, and collaborators on HIV cure studies’ risks, risk perceptions, and ethics
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    Research Assistant III: Work with Professors Eyal, Hammitt, Freedberg, Kuritzkes, and collaborators on HIV cure studies’ risks, risk perceptions, and ethics

    The research assistant will work with the principal investigator Nir Eyal and collaborators from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Duke University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as the ACTG HIV trial site network. The multidisciplinary team uses methods of clinical epidemiology, economics, simulation modeling, and normative theory…