Behavioral Economics to Understand Sustainable and Healthy Decision-Making: Current Knowledge and Research Agenda

Shifting consumer behavior towards sustainable and healthy food choices is challenging. The intention-behavior gap underscores the need to leverage insights from behavioral economics to understand why intentions often fail to translate into action. Balancing personal desires with long-term outcomes is challenging for consumers, and this is further complicated by the abstract, long-term nature of sustainability benefits and the food environment that facilitates succumbing to short-term desires rather than long-term goals.

Behavioral economics offers insights into these decision-making processes, revealing that consumers are not always rational and are influenced by heuristics and biases. This chapter provides an overview of the most relevant ones for food choices, focusing on default, satisfactory outcomes, morality, ignorance, mental accounting, loss aversion, temporal discounting, social influence, reward incentives, and trust. Behavioral economics also faces limitations, including the need to transcend unconscious small nudges, towards more theoretical foundations and better integration of economic and psychological models, further progressing towards a focus on enduring behavioral change and real-life validations. Addressing these gaps can enhance the effectiveness of strategies to encourage sustainable and healthy food choices. Integrating the insights into policy design enables the development of effective strategies that bridge the gap between consumer intentions and behaviors, fostering a transition towards healthier and more sustainable food consumption patterns.