Welcome

During the last decades, a wealth of interdisciplinary research has shown that the quality of decisions does not steadily increase with the increase of information provided to consumers and businesses. At the same time, behavioral law and economics research has invented and promoted new “soft” ways of regulating the behavior of market actors: the so-called “nudges”. In the last years, many governments worldwide and the European Union have taken up the message and established so-called “nudging units” or “behavioral insights teams” with the aim of improving regulation in areas like health, family, finance, consumer protection, taxes, energy and environmental protection.  

After decades of academic research, the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics won by Richard Thaler (Thaler & Sunstein, Nudges 2008) and several years of political endeavor, 2018 seems to be a good year to ask the following questions: 

What did governments and researchers precisely mean by the terms “nudging” and “behaviorally informed” instruments in their past activities? Are these “new” instruments already visible in the respective policy areas and how effective are they? In how far are they a complement or a real alternative to classical instruments of regulation, in particular to the disclosure of information and the information paradigm of some areas of law? Does behavioral research focus too much on the decisions of consumers and neglect the perspective of influencing business behavior? How should behavioral differences of specific groups of addressees (old/young, educated/less educated etc.) be reflected by different regulatory approaches? Which roles do legal and economic models of rational behavior still play in modern behavioral approaches? Are judgmental “biases” viable concepts that are sufficiently established by empirical research? May human “biases” be exploited by governments and enterprises to reach their respective goals, or is only “de-biasing” regula-tion legitimate? What are the challenges for future research in the area of behavioral law and economics? 

The conference wants to unite perspectives of experimental economists, of social psychologists and of legal scholars on the subject matter. The overall aim of the conference is the presentation of the status quo of behaviorally informed regulation as a basis for the discovery and investigation of new fields and questions for interdisciplinary behavioral legal research and market regulation. The main disciplines involved are psychology, sociology, legal and political theory, economics and law.