According to a standard principle in free speech law, the remedy for falsehoods is "more speech," not enforced silence. But empirical research demonstrates that corrections of falsehoods can actually backfire, by increasing people's commitment to their inaccurate beliefs, and that presentation...

This paper offers a framework for regulating internalities. Using a simple economic model, we provide four principles for designing and evaluating behaviorally-motivated policy. We then outline rules for determining which contexts reliably reflect true preferences and discuss empirical...

In the modern regulatory state, there is a serious tension between two indispensable ideas. The first is that it is important to measure, both in advance and on a continuing basis, the effects of regulation on social welfare, usually through cost-benefit analysis. The second idea, attributable...

Choice can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. In some contexts, people choose not to choose, or would do so if they were asked. For example, many people prefer not to make choices about their health or retirement plans; they want to delegate those choices to a private or public...

For most people, control has some intrinsic value; people care about maintaining it and will pay something to do so. Whenever a private or public institution blocks choices or interferes with agency, some people will rebel, even if exercising control would not result in material benefits or might...

In many settings, human beings are boundedly rational. A distinctive and insufficiently explored legal response to bounded rationality is to attempt to "debias through law," by steering people in more rational directions. In many important domains, existing legal analyses emphasize the...

When members of deliberating groups speak with one another, their predeliberation tendencies often become exacerbated as their views become more extreme. The resulting phenomenon-group polarization-has been observed in many settings, and it bears on the actions of juries, administrative...

Many studies find that presentation of balanced information, offering competing positions, can promote polarization and thus increase preexisting social divisions. We offer two explanations for this apparently puzzling phenomenon. The first involves what we call asymmetric Bayesianism: the same...

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that in some contexts and for identifiable reasons, people make choices that are not in their interest, even when the stakes are high. Policymakers in a number of nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom, have used the underlying...

Many consumers suffer from present bias. To present-biased consumers, the long-term is a foreign country, and they are not sure that they will ever visit. If consumers suffer from present bias, there is room to rethink national policies in multiple domains. For example, regulatory mandates might...