Dr Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko receives EUR Fellowship

She has received several seed grants as the principal investigator to conduct experimental research in this field, and also cooperates on other projects in different fields (terrorism, constitutional rights, copyrights, etc.). Elena has been publishing in internationally acclaimed refereed journals, such as Journal of International Criminal Justice (where she won the best paper 2017 prize), Journal of Economic Psychology, American Criminal Law Review, Washington University Law Review, etc., which is exceptional for a young scholar like Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko.

Dr Kantorowicz-Reznichenko received the EUR Fellowship, enabling her to focus on her research project titled “Don’t Mess with My Mind: Improving the Use of Behavioural Insights in Policy Making”. In recent years, the application of insights from psychology and behavioural economics to design regulations became popular in many countries around the world. For example, setting certain saving plans as a default to increase the number of people choosing those plans. The idea in many of such policies is to use psychological biases people are subject to, in order to influence their behaviour. One of the problems with this practice is that many of these effects are covert, i.e. people are not aware of the biases, and also not aware those biases are used to affect their behaviour. One solution is to introduce transparency in such policies. However, this solution was criticized with a concern that making people aware of the way the policy works (the psychological channel of influence) would reduce its effect. This is, in fact, an empirical question, yet the empirical evidence on this topic is scarce. Therefore, in her project, Elena will investigate the influence of transparency on the effectiveness of different “nudges” (a type of behaviourally informed interventions) using experimental methods.