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- 4th Dec 2012
Christmas shopping tips from a behavioural economist
Tips from Cass Sunstein, click here to read the article.
- Blog
- 25th Sep 2013
Pensions policy shows the power of defaults
The past year has seen one of the biggest changes to pension schemes in recent times. Starting with the largest employers, workers are now being automatically enrolled in a scheme when they join a company. In other words, now people have to make a decision to leave their employer’s scheme,…
- Blog
- 5th Sep 2014
Empowering consumers in order to reduce mobile phone theft
On 3rd September the Home Secretary announced that we will be publishing a joint BIT/Home Office analysis intended to better inform consumers about mobile phone theft and security. The analysis uses Metropolitan Police Service data to show how offenders disproportionately target certain phones; how these patterns are sensitive to security…
- Blog
- 15th Dec 2016
Behavioural finance in the Lab
Some of the earliest and most impressive applications of behavioural science focused on helping people to save for their retirement. In particular, there is the pioneering work of Brigitte Madrian, David Laibson, John Beshears and James Choi demonstrating the impact of automatically enrolling employees into workplace pension plans, and Richard…
- Blog
- 14th Oct 2017
Helping more people take up free pension guidance: new results
With most people spending at least 25 years in retirement, deciding what to do with your pension pot is one of the most significant financial decisions you can make. And yet it is also one of the most complicated. Today we are publishing the results of three randomised control trials…
- Blog
- 30th Nov 2017
The Nest Learning Thermostat: Making energy savings easy
How many of us have our heating programmed to automatically come on when we get home? In which case, how often do we come home late, to find the heating has been on unnecessarily? Or perhaps we find ourselves watching TV, suddenly a little hot, realising we could have turned…
- Blog
- 12th Feb 2018
One letter that triples energy switching
In the UK, 9.5 million households can save over £300 a year by switching energy supplier. For many people that is a substantial boost to their household budget, and yet in a survey of UK consumers, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that 34% of respondents had never considered…
- Blog
- 12th Apr 2018
Modernising consumer markets: the Consumer Green Paper
At BIT, we are passionate about ensuring that consumers benefit from well-functioning markets — from better deals to higher quality services. We want governments, regulators and businesses to, in Richard Thaler’s phrase, ‘nudge for good’. The UK Government’s Consumer Green Paper, published yesterday, encourages just that. The Green Paper is…
- Blog
- 18th May 2018
A changing lens: fixed-odds betting machines, civil society and UKRI
We often say that behavioural science can be used for good or bad, just like any form of knowledge. One of the troubling applications – though brilliant in its own way – can be to nudge people to gamble too much. This week saw the decision to dramatically curtain the…
- Blog
- 11th Jun 2018
BX2018: Helping people save on their energy
This blog post is the third in a series that we are writing in the lead up to the 2018 Behavioural Exchange in Sydney. It outlines our recent work in energy markets, which is the focus of one of the breakout sessions. As energy has been an area that we’ve…