Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness was first published in 2008 by Yale University Press. It became one of the most influential policy books of the early twenty-first century, inspiring the creation of government nudge units in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Germany, and dozens of other countries, and reshaping how policymakers, businesses, and institutions think about the relationship between decision-making environments and human behaviour.
Nudge: The Final Edition, published in 2021, is a comprehensive revision that incorporates thirteen years of implementation experience, new research, significant expansions of the core theory, and responses to the critiques that the original edition generated. It adds new chapters on the COVID-19 pandemic’s lessons for nudge theory, substantially expands the treatment of choice architecture in digital environments, updates the policy applications across every major domain, and introduces the EAST framework (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) as a practical guide for nudge design. It also engages more directly with the libertarian critiques of paternalism that the original generated and with the sludge concept, the inverse of the nudge: friction and complexity deliberately or inadvertently placed in the path of beneficial behaviour.
