Applying Behavioral Economics to Public Policy in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Behavioral economics incorporates ideas from Psychology, Sociology, and Neuroscience to better predict how individuals make long-term decisions.Often the ideas adopted include present or inattention bias, both potentially leading to sub-optimal outcomes.But these models also point to opportunities for effective, low-cost government policies that can have meaningful positive effects on people's long-term well-being.The last decade has been marked by a growing interest from governments the world over in using behavioral economics to inform policy decisions.This is true of Canada as well.In this paper we discuss the increasingly important role behavioral economics plays in Canadian public policy.We first contextualize government policies that have incorporated insights from behavioral economics by outlining a collection of models of intertemporal choice.We then present examples of public policy initiatives that are based upon findings in the field, placing particular emphasis on Canadian initiatives.We also document future opportunities, challenges, and limitations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".