WHY BEHAVIOURAL POLICY NEEDS MECHANISTIC EVIDENCE

Till Grüne-Yanoff

Economics and Philosophy, 2016, vol. 32, issue 3, 463-483

Abstract: Proponents of behavioural policies seek to justify them as ‘evidence-based’. Yet they typically fail to show through which mechanisms these policies operate. This paper shows – at the hand of examples from economics and psychology – that without sufficient mechanistic evidence, one often cannot determine whether a given policy in its target environment will be effective, robust, persistent or welfare-improving. Because these properties are important for justification, policies that lack sufficient support from mechanistic evidence should not be called ‘evidence-based’.

Date: 2016
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