Policy Punchline

Hunt Allcott is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research visiting the Economics Department at Harvard University in 2020-2021. An applied microeconomist who studies topics in behavioral economics, environmental economics, public economics, and industrial organization, Prof. Allcott is also a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics and a Scientific Director of ideas42, a think tank that applies insights from psychology and economics to business and policy design problems. Prof. Allcott is a leading scholar in the emerging field of behavioral public economics, which asks questions such as: How can we do welfare analysis if choice does not necessarily identify utility? How do we empirically measure consumer bias? How do we set socially optimal policies in the presence of bias? Are nudges a good idea? Behavioral economics extends the study of public economics in three ways: 1) new welfare implications of standard policies; 2) new policy tools like nudges; and 3) better predictions about how pe