What Is Really Behavioral in Behavioral Health Policy? And Does It Work?

Abstract Across health systems, there is increasing interest in applying behavioral economics insights to health policy challenges. Policy decision makers have recently discussed a range of diverse health policy interventions that are commonly brought together under a behavioral umbrella. These include randomized controlled trials, comparison portals, information labels, financial incentives, sin taxes, and nudges. A taxonomy is proposed to classify such behavioral interventions. In the context of risky health behavior, each cluster of policies is then scrutinized under two respects: (i) What are its genuinely behavioral insights? (ii) What evidence exists on its practical effectiveness? The discussion highlights the main challenges in drawing a clear mapping between how much each policy is behaviorally inspired and its effectiveness.