Behavioural 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 behavioural sciences, effective and low-cost regulations can emerge in the form of default rules, smart disclosure and simplification requirements. While behaviourally-informed intervention has a huge potential for policymaking, it also attracts legitimacy and practicability concerns.
Nudge and the Lawtakes a European perspective on those issues and 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.
Alberto Alemanno is Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law and Risk Regulation at HEC Paris and Global Clinical Professor at New York University School of Law.
Anne-Lise Sibony is Professor of EU Law at the University of Louvain.
I unreservedly recommend it to anyone who is interested in behavioural law and economics or wants to know more about the limitations of the current EU law and how improvements can be made. Dr. Qi Zhou,Maastricht journal of European and comparative law
In Nudge and the law1 Alemanno and Sibony have gathered together an important set of contributions to the debate about behaviourally informed regulation. Fabrizio Esposito,Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies
The book makes important and novel contributions in a range of topics on both a theoretical and a substantial level. Philipp HACKER,European Review of Private Law
[The book] offers an excellent and, in mlS(