Nudge and the Law

"Behavioural sciences provide a better understanding of human decision-making. Increasingly, governments around the world are keen to rely on these insights for reshaping public interventions in a wide range of policy areas such as energy, health, financial services and data protection. When policy-making meets behavioural sciences, effective, low-cost and choice preserving regulations can emerge in the form of default rules, smart disclosure and simplification requirements. While behaviourally-informed regulation has a huge potential, it also attracts legitimacy and practicability concerns. Nudging and the Law explores the legal implications of the emergent phenomenon of behavioural regulation by focusing on the challenges and opportunities it may offer to EU policy-making and beyond. "This book offers an exceptionally impressive, and wide-ranging, set of essays on behaviourally informed approaches to law and regulation in Europe, with particular reference to nudges. In Europe as elsewhere, an important question is drawing increasing attention: what are the ethical limits on nudges? Insofar as the goal is to promote navigability, the ethical objections are greatly weakened and might well dissipate. In this regard, Alemanno and Sibony offer some helpful reflections on how to assess the autonomy objection to nudges. They argue, plausibly in my view, that many behavioural interventions are neutral with respect to autonomy because they affect behaviour in instances where, in all likelihood, no deliberation would have taken place." From the Foreword by Cass R Sunstein, Harvard School of Law."--Bloomsbury Publishing.