Choice Architecture: Nudging for Sustainable Behavior

Sustainable management demands an in-depth understanding of current global economic, social and environmental pressures. This chapter deals with the use of choice architecture and its potential to influence decision-making. It focuses primarily on the discussion of how nudges influence choice, their applications to design interventions to promote behavioral change, and the challenges and ethical concerns to individuals' freedom of choice. The major contribution of nudge theory was to aggregate and bring the concepts to the public debate and encourage its application by governments and policymakers in large-scale public policy. Nudging is often described as the application of behavioral economics. Using behavioral change to promote sustainability involves approaches that can be applied in several areas, such as consuming, saving, investing and productivity. Nudging uses different sets of behavioral insights and we distinguish between two kinds of nudges: heuristics-based nudging and information-based nudging.