The Decision Corner

Zeina Afif is a Senior Social Scientist with the World Bank’s Mind, Behavior & Development Unit (eMBeD), within the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank. Zeina is currently working on applying behavioral insights to improve women’s access to finance and jobs, reduce youth unemployment, reduce gender-based violence, promote social cohesion, and improve access to public services and programs in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Latin America & Caribbean region. Prior to joining the team, Zeina provided operational communication and behavioral insights support to World Bank projects and has worked in countries such as Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, and Yemen in the areas of taxes, social protection, social accountability, and citizen engagement. Zeina holds a MBA from George Washington University, and a M.Sc. in Behavioral Science from London School of Economics.

In today’s episode of The Decision Corner, we are joined by Faisal Naru, the head of strategic management and coordination in the executive director’s office at the OECD. Faisal has extensive experience in political strategy, public policy, behavioral insights, institutional reform, and global development.

For reference, the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are Faisal’s own and do not represent the views of the OECD or any of its members.

Faisal is a co-founder of the European Nudge Network, Board of Trustees of Nudge Lebanon and he serves on a number of international committees including the Green Growth Knowledge Platform’s Behavioural Insights Research Committee & the United Nations Multi-stakeholder Advisory Committee (MAC) of the 10 YFP Sustainable Lifestyle and Education Programme.

Faisal is a former member of the UK Cabinet Office, Chief Adviser to the government of Viet Nam and he belongs to the leadership team of a global development consultancy. He advises a number of government leaders on reform and improvements. He began his career heading up a charity tackling social mobility, and he graduated from the University of Oxford.

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In today’s episode of The Decision Corner, we are joined by Sandi McCoy, associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and Aarthi Rao, director of the design and innovation lab at CVS Health.

For reference, this episode was taped prior to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and accordingly reflects the understanding of the situation at the time.

Sandi studies how social, economic, and cultural forces influence disease transmission and health outcomes. During the past several years, she’s explored these relationships through the lens of HIV infection and reproductive health. Using a diverse array of approaches, her goal is to identify innovative, cost-effective, and scalable interventions to overcome global health challenges.

Aarthi leads an innovation team to apply tools such as design thinking and behavioral science to unlock new cross-functional innovation roadmaps and directly incubate new high-value business concepts to various stages of prototyping, piloting, and product development. Ms. Rao is passionate about applying interdisciplinary approaches to create, test, and scale innovative programs and services to improve lives, particularly for programs supporting hard to reach or vulnerable populations across the world. She’s an experienced innovation advisor and problem solver, who’s lived and worked abroad, to partner with mission-driven companies, non-profits, researchers, and social enterprises who may want to try applying design thinking in combination with behavioral science and experiments to improve outcomes.

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In today’s episode of The Decision Corner, we are joined by Margarita Gomez, the inaugural executive director of the People in Government Lab, located in the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. The People Lab is the School’s innovation-in-government project aiming to improve the motivation, responsiveness, and effectiveness of people working in government.

For reference, this episode was taped prior to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and accordingly reflects the understanding of the situation at the time.

Margarita has more than 12 years of experience working to build better governments and to design more effective public policies. Throughout her career, she has blended practice and theory, in both academia and the public sector. Previous to her current appointment, Margarita founded and led the first Behavioural Unit in Mexico and served as principal advisor to the Minister of Public Safety and Ministry of Defence in Mexico.

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In today’s episode, Brooke Struck, the research director at The Decision Lab, is joined by Gianluca Sgueo, associate researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and a New York University Global Professor (Florence). He holds administrative positions at the Sole24Ore Business School (Italy). In the governmental sphere, Professor Sgueo is a policy analyst in the European Parliamentary Research Service. He previously held high-level positions in the Italian government, including Head of Communications and Citizens’ Dialogue. His work examines the effects on democracy of topics such as gamification, civil society groups, and lobbying.

In today’s episode, we are joined by Julian Jamison, a professor of Economics at the University of Exeter and an affiliate at the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Jameel Abdul Latif Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Prior to this, Julian spent 9 years in the public sector working for the United States government as Section Chief of the Decision-making and Behavioral Studies group and as a Behavioral Economist for the Global INsights Initiative at the World Bank (now known as the Mind, Behavior and Development Unit, or eMBeD).

Julian holds a B.S and M.S in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Game Theory from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His academic work focuses on the interaction between individual preferences, decisions, and well-being, and on institutional policies, including explicit welfare tradeoffs. He uses a wide range of methodological approaches, including mathematical theory, lab and field experiments, formal rhetoric, surveys, and large administrative data analytics. Julian’s work has been featured by The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Forbes, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and The Economist.

In today’s episode, we are joined by Jesse Itzkowitz, Senior Vice President and Behavioral Scientist at Ipsos Behavioral Science Center, a leading global market research and consulting firm. Prior to joining IPSOS, Jesse held an extremely successful academic career as a Professor from Yeshiva University, where he was twice awarded Professor of the year. Holding a dual PhD degree in marketing and cognitive psychology from the University of Florida has equipped him with a valuable (and extremely unique) skillset that enables him to be both scientifically rigorous and responsive to the needs of the industry. His research has received extensive press coverage from the Wall Street Journal, Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, and CNN. Last winter he gave an informal synopsis of his interests and body of work in a TEDx talk.

In today’s episode, we are joined by Evelyn Gosnell, Managing Director at Irrational Labs and frequent speaker in behavioral economics and consumer psychology. She is an expert in helping companies use the science of decision-making to better understand how real people think and behave, thereby creating better products and services for them. Evelyn is also the Head of Product Development and Behavioral Science at Shapa, a health startup founded by behavioral scientist Dan Ariely. Evelyn’s work spans across a broad array of industries. She has launched major health initiatives with companies such as Aetna, developing and implementing behavioral training programs to be used at scale.  She has worked with Google, Procter & Gamble, The World Bank, Maritz, AARP, CUNA Mutual, among others. Evelyn also teaches a course on behavioral economics through UCSD Extension and is a frequent guest lecturer at the Rady School of Business at UCSD.

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In today’s episode, we are joined by Ting Jiang, Principal at Center for Advanced Insight, a behavioral science lab at Duke University, researching and designing interventions and products for behavioral change. Ting is an experimental economist by training, a philosopher at heart and a psychologist in action. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, conducting research on diagnostic tools for social norms and interventions for norm change. For the past two years, a substantial portion of her time has been dedicated to conducting field studies and designing product solutions to help low-income Kenyans improve their financial and health decisions.

In today’s episode, we are joined by Chief Executive of the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), David Halpern. He has led the team since its inception in 2010 and was the founding director of the Institute for Government. Between 2001 and 2007, David held tenure at Cambridge and held posts at Oxford and Harvard. He has written several books and papers on areas relating to behavioral insights and wellbeing, including Social Capital (2005), the Hidden Wealth of Nations (2010), Inside the Nudge Unit (2015). David is also co-author of the MINDSPACE report.

In this episode, we discuss the current state of the behavioral science industry and its role within the public and private sectors, as well as predictions for how it will evolve.