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This study aims to identify the origins, mechanisms and outcomes of applying behavioral insight in public policy research.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review to answer three research questions. The authors identified 387 primary studies, dated from January 2000 to April 2021 and coded them through a thematic analysis. Related studies were obtained through searching in Emerald, ScienceDirect, Sage, Springer, Wiley and Routledge.

The results identified eight themes for origins, 16 themes for mechanisms/techniques and 13 outcome-related themes. Through the thematic analysis, the major mechanisms of behavioral approach were found to be social marketing, information provision, social norms, incentives, affect, regulation design, framing, salience, defaults, simplification, networking, environment design, scheduled announcements, commitments, attitude-preference-behavior manifestation and combining behavioral and nonbehavioral mechanisms.

The findings of this review help policymakers to design or redesign policy elements.

This review provides the first systematic exploration of the existing literature on behavioral public policy.

Escalation in the number of online food ordering platforms, along with extensive junk food marketing, lucrative offers and discounts, innovation in food flavors, and doorstep delivery of food, have triggered the consumption of high-calorie and unhealthy food products which pose serious threats to the health and future well-being of individuals by making them more obese. To date, several public policy frameworks have been developed to confront obesity; however, their efficacy seems debatable. Directionally, the objective of this study is to highlight the potential influence of “digital nudging” which aims at steering individuals in desired directions, at the same time delimiting their freedom of choice. The study also establishes the effectiveness of digital nudges promoting a healthy lifestyle by steering individuals toward healthier food choices. The author strongly believes that this conceptual perusal will offer immense inputs to healthy food marketers and researchers alike in addressing the matters of obesity. Addressing the menace of obesity calls for joint efforts of the government, the public, researchers, and more specifically food product manufacturers/marketers who should incorporate healthier food options into their portfolios. E-tailers are also urged to adopt such practices in virtual markets and promote healthier food options to effectively tackle obesity.

This study aimed to empirically examine the effectiveness of disclosing user comment history without disclosing personal identity as a nudge policy to refrain users from posting malicious content online.

The authors collected the number of comments and posters from the leading portal website in South Korea, Naver.com. To causally investigate the impacts of the new nudge policy on the number of comments and posters, the authors used the regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach.

The authors found that the new policy reduced all types of comments, including the number of malicious comments, self-deleted comments and current comments. This resulted in an overall decrease in the total number of posted comments, which is considered a side effect. In addition, the authors found that the effect of the nudge policy, which disclosed user comment history, has a stronger effect on older female users than their counterparts.

The study findings extend the current knowledge on a nudge policy being implemented by a website as a means to reduce malicious online content and how it impacts user content posting behaviors.

Perceived effectiveness of nudging has been established as one of the most reliable predictors of acceptance of nudging. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how source credibility and argument strength influence the perceived effectiveness of textual information about food-related nudging in order to provide a better understanding of how acceptance of nudging may be facilitated.

A 2 × 2 scenario-based between-subjects factorial experiment with source credibility (high vs low) and argument strength (high vs low) as factors was applied. Data on respondents’ level of involvement in food-related behaviour were also collected.

Argument strength had a positive main effect on the perceived effectiveness of nudging, and there was a significant positive interaction effect of source credibility × argument strength on the perceived effectiveness of nudging.

The findings of this paper provide policy makers and other decision makers with a better understanding of how information about nudging should be communicated to consumers in order to facilitate acceptance.

This paper is one of the first to investigate how information about nudging should be communicated to consumers in order for nudging to be perceived as an effective and thus acceptable measure to influence food-related behaviour.

The critical role of diet in climate change mitigation has raised behavioural approaches to the top of the agenda. In this paper, the authors take a critical look at these behavioural approaches and call for a more dynamic, practice-oriented understanding of long-term changes in sustainable food consumption and supply.

This approach is based on the experiences from a long-term experiment promoting sustainable eating in a workplace lunch restaurant using a series of informational and nudging techniques. In the experiment, the authors found that focussing solely on eating behaviours did not help to capture the multi-level change processes mobilised. The authors therefore propose a more dynamic, practice-oriented methodology for examining long-term changes in sustainable eating. The emprical data of the experiment are based on qualitative and quantitative data, consisting of customer survey, customer and kitchen personnel focus group discussions and monitoring data on the use of food items in the restaurant and their climate impacts.

The results draw attention to a series of practical challenges restaurants face when promoting sustainable eating. Directing analytical attention to tinkering helped to reveal the tensions brought about by labelling and nudging in menu planning and recipe development. The results show how tinkering required attentiveness to customers' wishes in both cases. Nudging offered more freedom for the restaurant to develop menus and recipes. In the case scrutinised, however, nudging customers towards tastier and more satiating vegetarian dishes included the use of dairy. This partly watered down the climate benefits gained from reduced meat consumption.

Rather than looking separately at changes in consumer behaviour and in the supply of food, the authors show how we need analytical concepts that enable the evaluation of their mutual evolution. Tinkering can assist us in this endeavour. Its adaptive, adjustive character, however, calls for caution. The development of praxis in food services and catering requires critical companions from the transdisciplinary research community. Research can provide systematic knowledge on the impacts of labels and nudges on kitchen praxis. However, research itself also needs to tinker and learn from experiments. This necessitates long-term speculative research strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the rationale and limitations of public nudging approaches currently to be found in the UK food choice environment.

The paper uses a critical review of the literature with case studies.

Nudging has potential value to assist healthier food choices, although the current focus of proponents tends to be the individual micro‐environment for selection rather than the wider food choice context. Ethical questions are raised by nudging as a policy and limited evidence of success to date would suggest that a combination of personalised tools and public nudges – individual empowerment and attention to the choice environment – might be more effective for embedded healthier eating.

This paper contrasts the underlying assumptions of the nudge approach by reference to the behavioural toolbox.

Since 2004, the British Government has delivered a national policy on social marketing that has created a new frame of reference in this field. This paper aims to study the genesis, evolution and implementation of the policy process that led to an important development in British public health.

An in-depth multifaceted single case study, mixing qualitative and quantitative data including participatory research, enabled by a cognitive approach based on elements of knowledge, ideas, representations and social beliefs in the elaboration of a public policy.

This approach to understanding the British policy on social marketing process demonstrates a useful explanatory capacity, producing a comprehensive articulation of the main cognitive, normative, and instrumental dimensions of this policy, including its significant mutations influenced by the 2008 Great Recession and subsequent political evolution.

This paper has followed the British social marketing policy’s implementation in England. In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, this national policy had specific developments that it was not followed in our study In general, subject to complex historical, social and political conditions, this is a field that preserves its dynamism and the ability to question concepts and processes. Ever seeking new directions and solutions, it requires an ongoing research study.

Conclusions speak in favour of a prescriptive framework for a national policy on social marketing that can inform other government entities’ efforts to develop similar policies in other countries. A correct understanding of such a political process can lead to better management of its development and its consequent contribution to improving social marketing policy and interventions.

A proper conception and management of a social marketing policy can contribute to improving the well-being of citizens.

It is the first time that this specific cognitive approach has been applied so systematically to a national social marketing policy through a long-term research, providing a prescriptive framework for other’ efforts to develop similar policies.

What is behavioral economics? This chapter explores a mismatch between what is included in the field of behavioral economics and some of the most visible Austrian critiques of behavioral economics. While paternalism, nudging, and a focus on irrationalities and biases are a big part of modern behavioral economics, the portrayal of the field of behavioral economics as being focused predominately upon those areas leaves a swath of low-hanging fruit that would be beneficial for Austrian scholars to consume and use in their own work.

This paper aims to develop a framework for benchmarking the maturity of public sector foresight programs and outlines strategies that program managers can use to overcome obstacles to foresight program development in government.

The public sector foresight benchmarking framework is informed by a bibliometric analysis and comprehensive review of the literature on public sector foresight, as well as three rounds of semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of a collaborative 18-month project with a relatively young department-level foresight program at the government of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country. The paper frames public sector organizations as “complex adaptive systems” and draws from other government initiatives that require fundamental organizational change, namely, “gender mainstreaming”.

Nascent or less mature programs tend to be output-focused and disconnected from the policy cycle, while more mature programs balance outputs and participation as they intervene strategically in the policy cycle. Foresight program development requires that managers simultaneously pursue change at three levels: technical, structural and cultural. Therefore, successful strategies are multi-dimensional, incremental and iterative.

The paper addresses two important gaps in the literature on public sector foresight programs by comprehensively describing the key attributes of mature and immature public sector foresight programs, and providing flexible, practical strategies for program development. The paper also pushes the boundaries of thinking about foresight by integrating insights from complexity theory and complexity-informed organizational change theory.