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  • Report
  • 15th Jun 2021

Making Markets Better

A policy manifesto for Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia

Key findings

  • 💸 COVID-19 has disrupted economies worldwide — behavioural insights can help us use this disruption to design better markets for the future. Our policy manifesto sets out a guide for making markets better in ANZ.
  • 🤔 Behavioural insights can play a critical role in improving markets and economies in ANZ — behavioural factors can explain why markets don’t alway deliver the best outcomes, as well as the psychological effects that shape individuals’ choices within markets.
  • 6️⃣ BIT’s 6 point plan on reshaping market policy puts human behaviour at its heart by focusing on measuring delivery and success, prioritising transparency, kickstarting disruption and more — all driven by evidence and an understanding of what works to improve markets.

The economic shocks of COVID-19 have both highlighted the need for, and presented the opportunity to, rethink markets and market policies. Drawing on the work of our The Behavioural Economy report, Making Markets Better explores how we can revolutionise markets through a behavioural lens and evidence-based strategies, in order to enhance economies in Australia and New Zealand. 

Markets shape our economies; but at the centre of markets are people, their motivations and their behaviours. By keeping people front of mind in redesigning market policy, we can create markets — and by extension, economies — that are stronger, more inclusive and more sustainable.  

In this report, we lay out a 6 point plan to reshape market policy with human behaviour at its heart. The core tenets of this plan focus on: 

  1. Measuring delivery and success: Collect data on behavioural drivers of market failures, such as sludge and complexity, to inform better policy and regulation
  2. Prioritising transparency: Bring transparency to business and government procurement markets. Make it easy to see the environmental and social impacts of superannuation and Kiwisaver investments, and drive competition in these markets.
  3. Tackling switching costs: Design and test the best ways of building trust and adoption of Consumer Data Right (CDR) initiatives, and extend these to cover online platforms.
  4. Kickstarting disruption: Use challenge funds to drive disruption, and speed up diffusion by actively disseminating “what works” to businesses.
  5. Challenging, testing and learning: Use debiasing tools and rapid testing to improve decision-making and policy design.
  6. Delivering public value as well as private benefit: Make it easy for stakeholders to measure and improve wellbeing outcomes.  

Keen to know more? Get in touch with our behavioural markets expert, Ravi Dutta-Powell, or check out our podcast with Minister Victor Dominello of the NSW Department of Customer Service, where he and Dr David Halpern discuss how we can make markets better. 

Want to be part of the conversation? Join our resident behavioural markets expert, Ravi Dutta-Powell, for a panel discussion with academics and regulators about why markets fail, why keeping human behaviour front and centre is so important to market success, and what actually works to make markets better. Attend in-person in Sydney or livestream the event virtually on 13 July 2021 — register here!

Download the report

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