Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy

Transparency and Public Communication Foster Trust in AI Companies

2026-02-11T17:12:40+00:00

This study examines how organizational characteristics of companies producing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies influence public trust through a vignette-based experimental design. Building on prior frameworks of trust, we focus on five sub-dimensions of trust: Benevolence, Standards and Guidelines, Data Quality, Reliability, and Transparency, each with three different levels. Results indicate that Transparency and Benevolence are the most significant drivers of trust. Organizations that provide clear explanations of their AI technologies and demonstrate societal accountability by seeking and incorporating public feedback are viewed more favorably. Adherence to external standards, such as national or international guidelines, further enhances trust, while technical performance and data quality are less influential, as participants assume the technology is functioning adequately for their limited use. We conclude that transparent practices, societal engagement, and institutional collaboration will foster public confidence in companies producing AI technologies.

Cooperation, competition, or conflict? A review of the multiple international sides of money

2026-02-11T17:17:32+00:00

Is money more likely to be a means of cooperation, competition, or conflict? The following thoughts discuss the main strands of literature investigating the dynamic role of money in a fast-changing financial world, thus trying to trace out the main social, economic and geopolitical implications of the evolution of the international monetary system toward the adoption of competing currencies. This study combines behavioral, monetary economic, and geoeconomics perspectives to introduce a methodological innovation to the traditional analysis of the role of money, providing a holistic view of ongoing monetary phenomena suited to interpret the increasing complexity of financial landscape and the new challenges of monetary policy in an environment of geopolitical tensions.

What Makes Buyers Willing to Pay More? On the Role of Touch in the Endowment Effect

2026-02-11T17:21:54+00:00

Touch has been shown to increase product valuation. Yet, the role of touch in the endowment effect – the tendency for sellers to value a good they own more than buyers do – has received little empirical attention and has been confounded with ownership, as sellers are typically handed a good and told they own it, whereas neither applies to buyers. We report an experiment in which we isolated the effect of touch in the absence of ownership. Buyers’ valuations were compared across conditions with and without touch, including a novel ‘Touch only’ modality, and touch valence (pleasant vs. unpleasant to touch), considering also buyers’ need for touch characteristics. We found that touch increased buyers’ valuations for a pleasant-to-touch good, with stronger effects for individuals high in instrumental need for touch. In addition, we provide a conceptual contribution to understanding the endowment effect and outline policy implications of varying touch availability and valence.

Measuring Administrative Friction: A Transaction-Cost Framework for Sludge Audits

2026-02-11T17:25:20+00:00

Sludge-those excessive frictions that slow or distort administrative processes–has become a central concern in Behavioural Public Administration, yet existing definitions and audit models remain conceptually vague and difficult to operationalize. Building on the literature on heuristics, biases, and transaction costs, this paper proposes a more precise and generalizable framework for identifying and measuring sludge within public organizations. After clarifying its relationship with related concepts such as ordeal mechanisms, red tape, and administrative burden, the paper connects sludge to the classic typology of transaction costs, expanding it with an additional category of red-tape costs. It then introduces a new Sludge Audit Model that decomposes processes into measurable sub-actions, quantifies time, direct costs, psychological costs, and opportunity costs, and identifies which steps can be simplified, digitized, or eliminated without reducing efficiency. The model aims to provide public administrations with a practical and scalable tool to diagnose frictions and prioritize interventions that improve administrative effectiveness.

Behavioral and Experimental Economics for Policy Design in the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: A Systematic Review of Methods and Applications

2026-02-11T17:29:13+00:00

Achieving universal access to safe water, reliable energy, and food security remains a global challenge, yet policy interventions often target these domains in isolation. While the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus provides a theoretical framework for resource integration, experimental evidence on behavioral interdependencies remains fragmented. This study conducts a systematic review of 37 experimental and behavioral economics articles evaluating interventions in developing and resource-scarce contexts to analyze methodological approaches and outcomes across the three sectors. Our findings reveal significant heterogeneity: Randomized Controlled Trials dominate the energy and food sectors, focusing primarily on technology adoption and subsidy effectiveness, whereas lab-in-the-field experiments are more prevalent in the water sector, emphasizing common-pool resource governance and collective action. Despite robust evidence that behavioral nudges and financial incentives boost short-term adoption and willingness to pay, the WEF Nexus remains tacit in experimental designs. Most studies treat inter-sectoral linkages as background conditions rather than central variables, missing potentially significant spillover effects between the three domains. We conclude that a transition toward “Nexus-aware” experimental designs is possible, utilizing joint metrics and longitudinal monitoring.

Is Men’s Skincare an Emerging Social Norm? Evidence from Norm-Elicitation Vignettes

2026-02-11T17:32:51+00:00

Our study examines whether men’s use of skin-care cosmetics constitutes a social norm in Bicchieri’s (2006, 2016) sense, via empirical and normative expectations and sanctions. Because norms constrain feasible action sets, norm diagnostics precede modelling of downstream determinants (Ajzen 1991). A bilingual Qualtrics survey (March 2025) produced an international sample with a substantial Hungarian component (n = 217), using third-person vignettes and 4-point likelihood scales to reduce self-presentation bias. Empirical and normative expectations cluster near the norm-consistent benchmark (≈ 3/4) and correlate moderately to significantly, consistent with an emerging norm. Sanctioning could not be assessed credibly because sanction items show low internal reliability (α < .40), precluding classification as an enforceable norm. Acceptability is higher when framed as health maintenance; limited communication may hinder consolidation, and reference-group effects vary by context. The findings characterise men’s skin-care use as a nascent norm and motivate incentive-compatible follow-ups on sanctioning and conditional compliance mechanisms.

Introduction to JBEP 9(2)

2026-02-18T09:21:06+00:00