Houses designed to be energy and water efficient often do not perform as intended. One of the reasons for this is occupant behaviour. Rebound effects and lack of awareness mean that behaviour and practices need to be addressed as part of the strategies to reduce emissions in the residential sector. While the design is important...

The Policy Project collaborated with the Government Economics Network (GEN) committee to facilitate workshops following the 2016 GEN conference on ‘People and Policy – how to make better and smarter policies through behavioural insights, design thinking and better use of data’. This document records:

This report provides an update of policy achievements in New South Wales that draw on the Behavioural Insights (BI) approach. BI draws on the behavioural sciences to help us understand how people act and make decisions in everyday life — ways that are often different from those assumed in standard economic models.

Many tax policies in Australia and comparable countries are based on a completely rational individual decision maker. However, recent evidence in the fields often referred to as behavioural insights (combining behavioural economics and psychology) have shown that people are neither completely rational not completely irrational. Rather, they exhibit predictable biases that reduce the probability of...

Enabled by exponential technological advancements in data storage, transmission and analysis, the drive to ‘datify’ our lives is creating an ultra-transparent world where we are never free from being under surveillance. Increasing aspects of our lives are now recorded as digital data that are systematically stored, aggregated, analysed, and sold. Despite the promise of big...