Dr. Eyal Pe'er

Nudges are simple and effective means to help people make decisions that could benefit themselves or society. However, effects of nudges are limited to local maxima, as they are almost always designed with the “average” person in mind, instead of being customized to different individuals. Such “nudge personalization” has been advocated before, but its actual potency and feasibility has never been systematically investigated. Using the ubiquitous domain of online password nudges as our testbed, we present a novel approach that utilizes people’s decision-making style to personalize the online nudge they receive. In two large-scale studies, we show how and when personalized nudges can lead to considerably stronger and more secure passwords, compared to administering “one-size-fits-all” nudges. We discuss the implications of this findings and how more efforts by researchers and policy-makers should and could be made to guarantee that each individual is nudged in a way most right for them. 

Behaviorally informed policies of interventions in choice architecture are growingly used to nudge people towards socially desirable behaviors. While consumers are usually the target of those nudges, businesses often serve as “nudging agents" on behalf of government regulation, or may be the target of governmental nudges themselves. Businesses’ support of such behavioral policies might be critical for their implementation, but the perceptions of managers towards nudges has never been directly assessed. We distinguish between government-to-business (G2B) nudges vs. government-to-business-to-consumer (G2B2C) nudges and provide first evidence of business managers’ attitudes towards such interventions. We discover an overall high level of support for nudges, and in particular for G2B nudges, with variations between types of nudges, the domain that they operate in, and whether they benefit the business or the consumer.

Attitudes of public groups towards behavioral policy interventions (or nudges) can be important for both the policy makers who design and deploy nudges, and to researchers who try to understand when and why some nudges are supported while others are not. Until now, research on public attitudes towards nudges has focused on either state- or country-level comparisons, or on correlations with individual-level traits, and has neglected to study how different social groups (such as minorities) might view nudges. Using a large and representative sample, we tested the attitudes of two distinct minority groups in Israel (Israeli Arabs and Ultra-Orthodox Jews), and discovered that nudges that operated against a minority group’s held social norms, promoting a more general societal goal not aligned with the group’s norms, were often less supported by minorities. Contrary to expectations, these differences could not be explained by differences in trust in the government applying these nudges. We discuss implications for public policy and for the research and applications of behavioral interventions.

Malleability of preferences is a central tenet of behavioral decision theory. How malleable preferences really are, however, is a topic of debate. Do preference reversals imply preference construction? We argue that to claim preferences are construed, a demonstration of more extreme preference malleability than simple preference reversals is required: absolute preference sign changes within participants. If respondents value a prospect positively in 1 condition but negatively in a different condition, preferences cannot be considered stable. Such absolute preference sign changes are possible under uncertainty. In 2 incentive‐compatible experiments, we found participants were willing to pay to take part in a gamble and also demanded to be compensated to take part in a subsequent gamble with identical outcomes and probabilities. Such absolute preference sign changes within participants led to simultaneous risk aversion and risk seeking for the same risky prospect, suggesting that, at least in the domain of risky decisions, consumers' preferences are indeed malleable and construed.