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An Expert Seminar on Behavioral Regulation was held at the Center for Strategic Research

Director of the RIA Center Daniel Tsygankov spoke at the expert seminar “Prospects for the application of behavioral approaches in Russian regulatory policy”, which was held on April 26 at the Center for Strategic Research.

The vice-president of the Center for Strategic Research Maria Shklyaruk opened the seminar.

In the past fifteen years nudging in public policy / behavioral insights applied to policy has come a long way from the first academic publications to the forefront of science and public administration. Instead of the former confidence of regulators that the stakeholders’ behavior is at least partially rational and that they possess sufficient information about phenomena and processes, and they can make decisions “favorable” for them, now there is an understanding of the greater complexity of the decisions made and the inevitable cognitive distortions of all participants of public relations. This development is marked not only by two Nobel Prizes for behavior studies (Daniel Kahneman in 2002 and Richard Thaler in 2017), but also the spread of behavioral approaches to all new industry and sectoral policies. According to the OECD, as of April 2018, more than 20 countries have established the so-called nudge units in government bodies, and only about 200 organizations around the world, including non-governmental and international ones, specialize in the application of behavioral approaches, and their number continues to grow.

At the first session of the seminar the director of the RIA Center Daniel Tsygankov spoke about the potential "alliance" of nudging and regulatory policy, and Alexey Efremov, the head of RIA sub-division of the Center for Program and Policy Evaluation shared different options of the formation of nudge units abroad. As part of the preparation of the sub-section on regulatory policy for “The Country’s Development Strategy for 2018-2024” the comparisons were made on the foreign experience and potential areas for the application of behavioral regulation in Russia; and this range extends from a decrease of household debt, a reduction in tax evasion to combating cartels, from stimulating the population to reduce the consumption of electricity and water / to separate garbage collection to reduction the number of incorrectly filled citizens' and companies’ applications. Potential interested stakeholders of nudge are not only government agencies, but also business (credit organizations, pharmaceutical companies, electronics manufacturers, garbage collection operators, debt collection companies, etc.). Therefore, the 2nd session of the seminar was used to present cases about the first applications of behavioral insights in Russia – in the work of police officers (head of the international laboratory of experimental and behavioral economics at the Higher School of Economics Alexey Belyanin) and in private law (director of the legal institute “M-Logos” Artyom Karapetov).