"When officials make wrong decisions, subconsciously or unconsciously influenced by their ideology, there are negative consequences. Wrong decisions can cost taxpayers money." So said Stefan Dercon, professor at the University of Oxford University and chief economist at department of development International of the British Government, at the 6th NCID Research Workshop at the University of Navarra.

The expert intervened in this workshop organized by the Navarra Center for International Development (NCID) of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) and the Ramón Areces Foundation. He presented research on the implications of public officials who implement public policies having a bias.

At work experiments were conducted on a group of new public employees, which showed that policy professionals can fall into decision-making traps-such as hidden costs or prioritizing their ideological positions-despite explicitly having the mission statement of promote unbiased, evidence-based decisions.

"This study can help illuminate within organizations the need to be aware of some of the typical biased decision-making behaviors that have been studied in the past," he notes." It may also serve to analyze what the implications are for the way public service or even business organization is organized."

Economics and bias

From agreement with the specialist, there is a dearth of programs of study on the biases of public policy professionals: the public officials who prepare and implement policies on behalf of elected candidates.

According to Dercon, "a lot of the research on Economics behavioral, at least as it relates to design policy, focuses mostly on citizens, taxpayers, consumers who don't make the right choices, savers who don't save enough, or people who should take out a pension plan and don't."

"I thought it was interesting," he explained, " not to take for granted that people who work for the government make perfect decisions.

Stefan Dercon referred to the bias that affects him most in his work as a civil servant: "We economists have a set of preconceived ideas about how the world works and sometimes we rely on theoretical assumptions."

As an example he mentioned the topic of incentives. "I think they are of crucial importance, but we have to be very aware that people are not just moved by the carrot tied to a stick, they are motivated by things like, for example, norms and values and their beliefs about how the world works to know what is the right thing to do. We have to be very careful not to reduce everything to incentives."