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ABSTRACT
Thaler and Sunstein (2008) advance the concept of 'nudge' policies—non-regulatory and non-fiscal mechanisms designed to enlist people's cognitive biases or motivational deficits so as to guide their behaviour in a desired direction. A core assumption of this approach is that policymakers make artful use of people's cognitive biases and motivational deficits in ways that serve the ultimate interests of the nudged individual. We analyse a model of dynamic policymaking in which the policymaker's preferences are not always aligned with those of the individual. One novelty of our set-up is that the policymaker has the option to implement a 'boost' policy, equipping the individual with the competence to overcome the nudge-enabling bias once and for all. Our main result identifies conditions under which the policymaker chooses not to boost in order to preserve the option of using the nudge (and its associated bias) in the future—even though boosting is in the immediate best interests of both the policymaker and the individual. We extend our analysis to situations in which the policymaker can be removed (e.g., through an election) and in which the policymaker is similarly prone to bias. We conclude with a discussion of some policy implications of these findings.

We analyze what can be inferred about a game's information structure solely from the probability distributions on action profiles generated during play; i.e., without reference to special behavioral assumptions or equilibrium concepts. Our analysis focuses on deriving payoff-independent conditions that must be met for one game form to be empirically distinguished from another. We define empirical equivalence and independence equivalence. The first describes when two game forms can never be distinguished based solely on the empirical distribution of player actions. As this turns out to be difficult to characterize, we introduce the latter, which describes two game forms that imply the same minimal sets of conditional independencies in every one of their empirical distributions. Our main contribution is to identify, for an arbitrary game form, the minimal set of conditional independencies that must arise in every one of its empirical distributions. We also introduce a new graphical device, the influence opportunity diagram of a game form which facilitates verifying independence equivalence, and hence provides a simple necessary condition for empirical equivalence.