Tag: Nudges

Adult and child holding kidney shaped paper on textured blue background.

Nudging Organ Donation in the United States

Chloe Reichel Leave a comment

Cross-posted from Harvard Law Today, where it originally appeared on November 13, 2020. 

By Chloe Reichel

Nationally and globally, demand for organ transplants outstrips supply. In the United States last year, 19,267 donors made a record-setting 39,718 transplants possible, but nearly 109,000 Americans still remain on the organ transplant waiting list.

Cass Sunstein ’78, Robert Walmsley University Professor and former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, believes “Nudge theory” might help bridge this gap between supply and demand.

Sunstein joined scholars and leaders in transplant services on Friday, Nov. 6 to discuss strategies to boost rates of organ donation at “Nudging Organ Donation: Tools to Encourage Organ Availability,” an event hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

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Nudges or Shoves in the Secondary Use of Health Data: What is the More Desirable Approach? (Part I)

Marcelo Corrales Leave a comment

By Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Janos Meszaros & Timo Minssen

Empirical studies in behavioral economics have demonstrated how people are biased and often make poor decisions against their best interests. This has led policy makers to promote choice-preserving approaches, a.k.a. nudges. However, there has also been an increasingly vocal group of legal scholars who are interest in asking whether mandates and bans can be more effective than nudges. As pointed out by Cass R. Sunstein and others, the rationale behind this question is very simple: If we know that people make mistakes, why should we insist on adopting approaches that preserve freedom of choice?

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#BELHP2014 Panel 2, Potential Problems and Limits of Nudges in Health Care

mbaum 1 Comment

[Ed. Note: On Friday, May 2 and Saturday, May 3, 2014, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted its 2014 annual conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.”  This is an installment in our series of live blog posts from the event; video will be available later in the summer on our website.]

By Matthew L Baum

In this next installment of today’s live-blogging of the conference (and with all of the caveats of live-blogging mentioned by my colleagues and my apologies for any errors or misrepresentations) we have Professors David Hyman (DH), Mark White (MW) and Andrea Freeman (AF) in a panel moderated by Glenn Cohen (GC) on the “Potential Problems and Limits of Nudges in Health Care”.

The panel began with DH, H. Ross & Helen Workman Chair in Law and Director of the Epstein Program in Health Law and Policy, University of Illinois College of Law, and a talk entitled, “what can PPACA teach us about behavioral law and economics” (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). DH began with the observation that nudges often work quite well… “unless they don’t”. While many nudges are “sticky”, i.e. they influence behavior in the way they were intended, others are “slippery”, i.e. they fail to influence behavior in the way they were intended. His talk set out to illustrate the phenomenon, and to pose two questions. The first was an empirical question: what makes a nudge sticky vs slippery? The second was philosophical: is it meaningful to talk about a “failed nudge” or when we do, do we really just mean failed marketing? He focused on an analysis of PPACA as a case study.

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