Resumo

The term “Behavioral economics” is now a prominent fixture on the intellectual landscape and has spawned applications to topics in economics, such as finance, game theory, labor economics, public finance, law, and macroeconomics. It has evolved from the psychology branch of behavioral decision research to a topic itself, including important insights from neurosciences and cognitive sciences in relation to the economic environment. On the public administration, behavioral sciences suggest that public servants’ judgments may be systematically biased under certain circumstances.

Assuming that the behavioral deviation from rationality can occur as a regular threat on the human behavior, we aim with this paper report through a systematic review the findings on the application of the behavioral economics principles on the public administration. A second step is to analyze researches that identify the effects of cognitive biases from the behavioral economics perspectives on public managerial decisions. It will provide a comprehensive overview of the problems that could emerge from this decision-making process.

Aliterature review can broadly be described as a systematic way of collecting and synthesizing previous research.The first step on the systematic review is the determine the appropriate search terms in order to primarily assess the research problem. The inclusion criteria of the papers intended to address the primary research question, which are the contributions and studies of behavioral economics principles that were empirically applied on the public administration field.

From the total of 401 papers a selection criterion was applied. From the qualitative assessment that included the analysis of the abstracts, only articles that encompassed any kind of behavioral science applied on the domain of public administration, employees, services and policies were selected and a total 48 papers were analyzed.Three axis were used to classify them: The motivated behavior had the influence of cognitive bias on decision making, the intervention within the behavior of a policy actor, in the form of information, insights, experiments or nudges and Performance of HR.

The studies show how the behaviors are influenced by cognitive bias that no human being is free from suffer. As the decisions of public managers have huge impact on the society and population, so has the bounded rationality that the decision makers and citizens can be affected. Strategies of controlling or minimize these distortions is being applied in the form of interventions like debiasing and nudges. These interventions can affect directly the performance of the Human Resources and actors of the public service.

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