This chapter explores advance care planning (ACP) from the perspective of patients and healthcare providers, as well as how behavioural economics principles could be used to encourage more people to engage with it. Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown at a global scale how quickly a person’s health can change and leave them unable to communicate or make decisions about their care, bringing home the importance of ACP discussions and having wishes known. While there are multiple barriers to having these conversations, for patients, physicians, and the systems they operate in, behavioural economics provides a framework for potential interventions that can help to overcome them. In the wake of this global pandemic, we have an opportunity to raise these conversations earlier, giving patients the opportunity to reflect, discuss, and feel more prepared.

This chapter examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has modified decision-making regarding old age. More specifically, is there evidence of the effect of a pandemic on age-based decision-making? Did the pandemic exacerbate existing cognitive biases that impact on older age populations? The chapter focuses on the presence of age-specific effects followed by an examination of these effects on ageing and behaviour. We discuss old-age narratives and ageing and look at how care decisions were influenced by the pandemic. The chapter ends with a discussion section, which puts forward a set of policy implications and suggestions.

In this chapter, we first review factors that may either produce vaccine hesitancy or lead people with favourable attitudes towards a vaccine to not get vaccinated soon enough. Then we propose behavioural science strategies for tackling these barriers to vaccine uptake and demonstrate that effective solutions vary based on individuals’ existing motivation to get vaccinated. This chapter ultimately seeks to synthesise behavioural science insights about promoting vaccinations and to highlight that aligning the intervention to the cause of individuals’ vaccination problem is key for effectively moving the needle for everyone.

In this chapter we distil the available systematic evidence of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on human behaviour, highlighting the contributions of behavioural science and the lessons learned from this multi-dimensional crisis. In light of this, behavioural science and policymaking could improve science communication and minimise the impact of false information, by leveraging various insights such as (i) nudging people to consider the accuracy of information and credibility of sources – for example, employing accuracy reminders; (ii) communicating risk more efficiently - for example,, using natural frequencies versus probabilities; and (iii) pre-exposing people to misinformation - for example,, adopting pre-emptive debunking. Behavioural science should thus continue informing the multi-disciplinary discussion about policy responses to future pandemics by systematically capturing and sharing the evidence about the direct and the spillover effects of future health crises on people’s health and behaviour.

In the UK government’s response and media reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, behavioural scientists have been consulted extensively, and occasionally maligned. The criticism of behavioural scientists, or at least those labelling themselves as such, has sometimes been deserved, in that some have attempted to address questions that fall beyond the remit of this multi-disciplinary field, have displayed undue confidence in their statements and advice, and/or have little discernible expertise in the branches of behavioural science that contribute most meaningfully to the identification of deep systematic patterns in human behaviour (e.g., behavioural economics and cognitive and evolutionary psychology). That being said, in this chapter we argue that behavioural scientists do have a potentially important role to play in any present and future infectious disease pandemic response, after expanding a little on those aspects of a pandemic where their advice is perhaps a little more circumspect.

Decisions regarding the authorisation of new vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 have been highly heterogeneous across countries, resulting in significant regulatory misalignment regarding the vaccines approved for use in different countries. This chapter argues that such misalignment reflects an appeal to a version of the ‘precautionary principle’, which we define as ‘erring on the side of rare events’ (ESRE). This chapter discusses some cognitive biases that affect decision-making under risk, including the role of the media, especially the effect of social media. Finally, we provide a discussion of public reactions to ESRE and some conclusions and policy implications.

Human challenge trials are trials in which volunteers are intentionally exposed to infectious disease-causing organisms for the purpose of testing novel vaccines or treatments, as well as to study the progression of the disease in a controlled environment. The practice of systematically infecting individuals with pathogens of interest has been recorded since the eighteenth century, although in most cases these infections did not meet the ethical standards that are in place today. With the rise of modern research ethics in the 1970s and the wider implementation of these standards by the 1980s, HCTs that have been conducted more recently have been used to safely study a wide variety of pathogens and speed up the development of vaccines for typhoid and cholera. Despite this historical precedent, the idea of conducting an HCT with SARS-CoV-2 (the causative agent of COVID-19) faced ethical and practical challenges, including the lack of any known rescue treatment for the disease and uncertainty around the potential long-term effects that volunteers exposed to the pathogen might someday experience. This chapter presents the research of 1Day sooner around the development of HCTs in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses how these findings may be relevant to pandemic preparedness efforts in the future.

This chapter attempts to provide an assessment of the state of the art, explaining the presence of an ethnic minority vector driving vaccine hesitancy, as well as a list of potential behavioural policy interventions to curb such inequality. We specifically focus on the behavioural insights that can explain the uneven access to vaccine across ethnic groups. This includes incentives and constraints that have been reported during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this chapter we discuss what kind of incentives works and when do certain incentives backfire. We then provide a series of policy recommendations to successfully create and implement vaccine roll-out strategies that members of ethnic minority groups will be receptive to.

In Chapter 2, we complete our discussion of standard introductory concepts, with a focus on rationality, choice, and opportunity costs. We extend these concepts to the economics of groups, with a discussion of incentives for individuals within small versus large groups. And we apply this to a discussion of shirking and the usefulness of “tough bosses.”

In Chapter 3, we open with a conventional description of demand, supply, equilibrium, and disequilibrium – with an added focus on “market processes,” nonprice competition, and a variety of real-world “equilibria” that still result in persistent shortages/surpluses (e.g., queues in stores). We also discuss Henry Ford’s use of “efficiency wages” to (efficiently) “overpay” workers, and the pros and cons of mandatory retirement for workers and firms.

In Chapter 5, we turn to applications in business and public policy, with discussions on the burden of taxes, price regulations, minimum wages, the buying/selling of fringe benefits within firms, and the role of honesty, credibility, and ethics within profit maximization.