Suppose you are in a pub with friends. You drink a few beers, have a good time, and head home. The following morning you realise your headache is milder than usual. You then discover that you were part of an experiment where the glasses at the pub were 25% smaller.
In their landmark 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, behavioural economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein defined a “nudge” as an intervention “that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”.
