Introduction to Behavioural Economics: Employee and Customer Behaviour

Gain the skills to motivate positive behaviour change

On this three-week course, you’ll gain the skills to push for positive behavioural change in your work place.

Guided by Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, you’ll learn how to promote positive behaviour change in your employees through effective incentives.

Through an exploration of incentivisation, default behaviours, and commitment, you’ll learn how you can use this understanding to motivate positive behaviour change in both your employees and customers.

Explore different types of incentives

To help you choose the right incentive for your context, you’ll explore the different types, such as financial and pro-social, and assess the success of each incentive in affecting behaviour change.

Next, you’ll learn the difference between incentives and commitments and explore how you could use commitment pledges to change behaviour in the workplace.

Discover the role of mental accounting

You’ll be introduced to reference points and mental accounting to understand how they affect the success of your incentives.

Through this exploration, you’ll discover how they exert influence and why they work so effectively in anything from pension choices to hospital care.

Understand key learnings in behavioural science

By the end of the course, you’ll understand the behavioural economic factors that can influence your employees and customers.

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn more about human behaviours and needs.

It will be particularly useful if you are a professional managing, building, or developing a team.

If you want to deepen your understanding of this subject, you may be interested in these courses. They feature similar subject matter and share the same overall learning outcomes:

• Social Psychology: Employee and Customer Behaviour
• Cognitive Psychology: Employee and Customer Behaviour

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn more about human behaviours and needs.

It will be particularly useful if you are a professional managing, building, or developing a team.

If you want to deepen your understanding of this subject, you may be interested in these courses. They feature similar subject matter and share the same overall learning outcomes:

• Social Psychology: Employee and Customer Behaviour
• Cognitive Psychology: Employee and Customer Behaviour

• Discuss the use of different types of incentives and how well they can effect behaviour change.
• Examine the role of reference points and mental accounting in conditioning the response to incentives.
• Differentiate between incentives which have risk and/or time components and those which don’t, and think about how to use both.
• Explore the relationship between financial incentives and pro-social motives.
• Consider the widespread presence of defaults and the role of inertia in much of their (and others’) decision-making.
• Discuss ways to improve default options based on key learnings in behavioural science.
• Discuss the role of ethics in nudging, with special reference to the case of defaults.