Behavioral economics and institutional innovation.

• Author: Shiller, Robert J.
• Position: Distinguished Guest Lecture

1. Introduction

I wish to talk today about how economic research leads to fundamental innovation in our economic institutions, institutions such as our social welfare system or our financial infrastructure. This topic is really about how economic research contributes to human welfare since so much of what helps humanity in the long term from economics comes from a change in our institutions.

In this context the major theme I wish to address is the importance of behavioral economics in bringing economic ideas to successful results. Behavioral economics is really the application of methods from other social sciences--particularly psychology--to economics. Behavioral economics is central to institutional innovation because it rounds out the details, the frictions or imperfections that might make some grand idea for a new economic institution unworkable if not appropriately dealt with.

A related theme that I wish to cover is to try to say something useful about the centrality and the difficulties of the inventive process that underlies institutional innovation and its essential similarity to engineering invention. The invention of economic institutions is not unlike engineering inventions: It must deal with a multitude of problems and obstacles, including the problem that the people who must use the invention are themselves imperfect. What engineers call "human factors engineering" is especially important in the invention of economic institutions. As with engineering inventions, the breakthroughs, the discoveries of new economic institutions, tend to be infrequent, sudden, and dramatic. Once an invention of an economic institution is made, it tends to be copied all over the world.

In the course of considering these themes, I will also make three subsidiary points: that institutional innovation requires a motivated and enthusiastic level of scholarly discussion of economic innovation, that a sense of economic crisis may often propel such discussion, and that advances in information technology are often behind major advances in economic institutions.

Some of these themes were discussed in my 2003 book The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century, which also included a number of proposals for new risk management institutions. But here I will focus on developing the basic ideas about institutional innovation further in the context of social insurance and with special attention to the role of behavioral economics.

In this talk I will consider a little history of thought in both fields, behavioral and institutional economics together, from the perspective of their contribution to some of our most important social welfare institutions, institutions that help people manage the risks of living. I will trace the interaction of practical policy with economic thought extending back to the beginnings of modern social welfare institutions in 19th-century Germany up to the present. The example of the invention of workers' compensation will be particularly stressed, as it affords a perfect example of the interplay between economic theory and behavioral economics in producing fundamental economic innovation. I hope this will offer some insights into the way that progress is made in economic policy through the interaction of economic thought and the experimentation of social policymakers.

2. Behavioral Economics

   We divide the social sciences according to subject matter but also according to method. We might define the field of economics in terms of subject matter as the study of prices, quantities, resource allocation, and economic organization. But we might also define the field of economics as it mostly exists today as a certain approach to social science, an approach that is based models of rational optimization and, in particular, of individuals' maximizing an expected utility function.

   Unfortunately, the division of the social sciences by subject matter does not neatly match with the division according to method. The method of modeling rational optimization is not coterminous with economics. Many other methods, including aspects of psychology, have long been used by economists; I will cover some of this later. Moreover, noneconomists often make use of the rational optimizing model. Political science has been heavily influenced by, some would say over influenced by, rational optimizing models. (1) The field of law has also had a great reliance on the rational optimizing model ever since Ronald Coase's work in the late 1950s and the founding then of the Journal of Law and Economics. Some would say too that the field of law was overinfluenced by the rational optimizing model. (2)

   The study of prices, quantities, and economic organization does not completely succeed if conducted only from the paradigm of rational optimization. There is increasing recognition of this fact. A behavioral economics revolution has been taking place, a revolution that has accelerated over the past l0 or 20 years.

   Herbert Simon, in his entry "Behavioral Economics" in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and Law (1998), pointed out that the term "behavioral economics" is a sort of pleonasm, for what else is economics about than a study of human behavior? How could it possibly be that all the work done in departments of psychology, sociology, and anthropology are irrelevant to economics? The discovery of behavioral economics in the past decade or two is really a return to reality from an untenable position that the rational optimizing model is the only framework for economics.

   Another revolution in economics has been taking place that is not usually associated with the behavioral economics revolution, and that is the institutional economics. It becomes related when on looks at the defining characteristics of the two fields. One of the cardinal principles of behavioral economics, as enunciated by its most important exponents, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (2000), is framing, that human actions are heavily influenced by frames of reference. The institutional structure that we have is the basic framework for all our economic decisions.

   All academic disciplines proceed by fits and starts, and a new paradigm, once adopted, tends to be carried too far, until earlier research assumptions are rediscovered. The exclusively reliance of many in the economic profession on the rational optimizing model was an example of carrying a model too far. Thus, we are seeing the emerging fields of what are called behavioral economics and the "new institutional economics," which are really returns to a more balanced approach to all of economics.

   One signpost of a revolution in economics is the founding of new societies and journals. The Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics was founded in 1982. The International Society for New Institutional Economics was founded in 1997. Other evidence can be found in the creation of new scholarly journals. The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization was created in 1980. The Journal of Economic Psychology was created in 1981. The Journal of Behavioral Finance was created in 1999 (under a slightly different title at first). The Journal oflnstitutional and Theoretical Economics began in 1997 (as a transformation of an earlier German journal), and in the same year the Review of Economic Design appeared.

   But the founding of societies and the establishment of journals does not accurately represent progress in the fields, for creative research is always directed by individual researchers, not organizations. There appears to be something to be gained by people of similar research methods coming together to talk with each other, but there is also the risk that by defining themselves as a separate group, they will lose their vitality and lose their ability to interact constructively with the profession at large.

   Behavioral economics and institutional economics represent two distinct branches of economic theory that are often viewed as not central to economic theory and have gone through periods of revival and discard over the history of economic thought. Behavioral economics has long been regarded as not very successful by many in the profession, for it has not produced an elegant theoretical framework that is readily applied to a wide variety of circumstances. Institutional economics has been criticized as little more than simple storytelling about our existing economic institutions and off-the-wall proposals for the future. But, despite their frequent disparagement, these fields thrive in their ability to make institutional innovation happen.

3. Economic Crisis as an Instigator of Institutional Innovation

   Economic research is a fairly steady enterprise, but major institutional innovation is not. Those who would like to see their economic theories embodied in new institutions may have to wait many years to see that happen. One reason that innovation seems so episodic is that it tends to be spurred by major economic crises and can take place only in the rare times when the public perceives an urgent need for change.

   Sometimes economic crisis can be so pressing as to bring economic innovation on even before the theorists have opined on it. An example is the 1780 invention of inflation-indexed bonds in early America, when the erosion of soldiers' pay by wartime inflation was so intense and so resented that it actually created some mutinies among American soldiers. But in such cases, the innovation, not fully worked out or justified in theory, may be abandoned as soon as the crisis is over. Inflation-indexed bonds were not issued again in the United States until 1997. (3)

   The American Economic Association was founded by practical economists who were motivated in some measure by the industrial depression of the 1870s. A period of irrational exuberance and overbuilding of railroads after the Civil War had led to a stock market crash (the panic of 1873) and a period of massive unemployment, by far the longest...