Alemanno Alberto, Sibony Anne-Lise (eds.) Nudge and the Law: A European Perspective

Hart Publishing, 2015. — 400 p.Behavioral sciences help refine our understanding of human decision-making. Their insights are immensely relevant for policy-making, since public intervention works much better when it targets real people rather than imaginary beings assumed to be perfectly rational. Increasingly, governments around the world are keen to rely on those 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 behavioral sciences, effective and low-cost regulations can emerge in the form of default rules, smart disclosure, and simplification requirements. While behaviorally-informed intervention has a huge potential for policymaking, it also attracts legitimacy and practicability concerns. This book takes a European perspective on those issues and explores the legal implications of the emergent phenomenon of behavioral regulation by focusing on the challenges and opportunities it may offer to EU policy-making and beyond. It will be a fascinating read for academics and practitioners working in the field of European law and consumer law, as well as for policymakers.