Question

What insights have education economists taken from behavioural economics?

Answer 1

Advantage

 Changing citizen behaviour in areas as diverse as cleanliness, use of digital money and education of
the girl child.

Way- forward
 Behavioural economics should be taught in many more educational institutions.

We need behavioral education economics to further our understanding of the complexity of educational decision making and to gain ground on some of the fundamental puzzles mentioned at the beginning of this article. But we also need it to formulate educational policy and to expand our knowledge of which educational interventions might possibly work and which not. Consider, for example, the question how one should design reward schemes for students or teachers. Do incentive schemes work at all and are they cost effective? If rewards work, then which ones are most effective (grading, financial, non-financial) and how should incentives be designed? Do explicit incentives lead to crowding out of intrinsic motivation and do they affect how teachers and students sort into schools? We discussed how behavioral economics can help address some of these questions. For example, analyzing how students respond to competition and what concerns for status they have can help to design better grading schemes (cf. Jalava et al., 2014). Understanding non-standard preferences, such as loss aversion, time-inconsistent preferences, or social preferences can help to think about how to design effective incentive schemes (cf. the field experiments by Fryer et al., 2012, Levitt et al., 2012).

Another example where behavioral economics can inform policy makers is the understanding of how self-control problems affect educational outcomes and how to design programs to cope with these problems. Here it is imperative to draw on existing experience with methods that address self-control problems. For instance, mental contrasting and implementation intentions can help to improve student performance. The intervention study “KIDS-WIN” by a research team around Daniel Schunk and Ernst Fehr at the Universities of Mainz and Zurich takes up these ideas to investigate how successful these tools are over a longer time horizon. Experiments can also reveal how environmental factors affect self-control. For example, Bucciol et al. (2011) conduct an experiment with children aged 6–13 in Italy to investigate the effect of temptation (working in view of one's favorite snack) on children's productivity (folding papers and marking items with a pen). When pooling all age groups together Bucciol et al. (2011) find no significant effect from temptation on productivity. However, they find that the productivity of young children is negatively affected by temptation, even though the subjects did not give in to the temptation. Another example is an experiment by Houser et al. (2012), who find that older children are better able to resist a temptation23 when their decision to resist is publicly observed by their classmates rather than privately made. However, for younger children there is no such effect.