Guest Editors:
Bernd Weber (University of Bonn) 

Lucia A. Reisch (Copenhagen Business School)

Our knowledge about the behaviour, but also internal decision processes, of consumers have increased profoundly over  recent years. Not only have we gained important insights into “irrationalities” of consumer choices, but these insights get more and more grounded in a strong biological basis of what decision research calls “value-based” choices. While this model provides a well-founded framework to understand underlying neurobiological processes, it also helps to understand dynamic processes of choice and influences on consumers, due to external cues like brands, claims or designs. These external cues have a strong impact on the way products are perceived, valuated and consumed, a fact which has largely been ignored. This knowledge can be used to improve the efficiency of customer-directed campaigns, increase the awareness of customers to dedicated information and finally improve overall well-being. 

This special issue should provide insights into the biological foundation of consumer behaviour and its implication for public policy. All papers should raise the policy implications that the research brings about. While some authors may present the state of the art of psychological and neuroscientific process-models of consumer choices, others may show how  neuroscience methods can help to provide information about not individuals but market-aggregates. 

Also, papers dealing with policy areas where the neuroscientific approach can be particularly
helpful are welcome, such as:
 adolescence and at-risk youth
 the challenges of improving life outcomes for low-SES families / poverty
 neuroscience and law
 consumer regulation
 diet, obesity and food choices
 racial and ethnic discrimination
 aging
 financial literacy and decision making (special kind of consumer regulation)
 violence and war
 changing behaviour towards more sustainable lifestyles
 education and learning
 biological and neural basis of political attitudes

The contributions need to be written for a multidisciplinary audience (and thus need to avoid formal model  jargon).  Submissions (max. 6000 words) are welcome until 1 t March 2017.

Behavioural Public Policy is an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to behavioural research and  its relevance to public policy. The study of human behaviour is important within many disciplinary specialties and in recent years the findings from this field have begun to be applied to policy concerns in a substantive and sustained way. BPP seeks to be multidisciplinary and therefore welcomes articles from economists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists,
sociologists, political scientists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, legal scholars and others, so long as their work relates the study of human behaviour directly to a policy concern. 

BPP focuses on high-quality research which has international relevance and which is framed such that the arguments are accessible to a multidisciplinary audience of academics and policy makers. All submissions are subject to blind peer-review and should conform to the submission guidelines outlined at www.cambridge.org/BPP.

If you have any questions please contact the editors, George Akerlof, Adam Oliver, and Cass Sunstein at bpp@cambridge.org.