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Identifying mechanisms of real-life human decision-making is central to inform effective, human-centric public policy. Here, we report larger trends and synthesize preliminary lessons from behavioral economic and neuro-economic investigations focusing on environmental values. We review the currently available evidence at different levels of granularity, from insights into how individuals value natural resources (individual level), evidence from work on group externalities, common pool resources, and social norms (social group level) to the study of incentives, policies, and their impact (institutional level). At each level, we identify viable directions for future scientific research and actionable items for policy-makers. Coupled with new technological and methodological advances, we suggest that behavioral economic and neuroeconomic insights may inform an effective strategy to optimize environmental resources. We conclude that the time is ripe for action to enrich policies with scientifically grounded insights, making an impact in the interest of current and future generations.

The ultimate goal of water resource management is the efficient allocation of increasingly scarce water resources. One of the most crucial and often obscure aspects of water resource management pertains to the behavioural particularities of the societal relationship with water; how people value the resource, how utility companies price the resource, and how policy makers derive financial instruments to address social dilemmas associated with common pool resources and public goods. This chapter explores the use of two complimentary approaches to derive both quantitative and qualitative data within an iterative process to provide evidence-based decision support in the sustainable management of water resources. Within this integrated approach, participatory Living Labs use small focus group settings to collect qualitative data about key phenomena. This qualitative evidence provides foundation for theoretical models that produce testable suggestions for economic experiments. The economic and behavioural experiments focus on gathering quantitative data to test a prediction, subsequently raising further questions – such as heterogeneity of behaviour, causal relationships between factors - that can be explored deeper by living labs qualitative angle. The Living Labs and Experimental Economics approaches have an iterative relationship, examples of which will be highlighted in this article.

Policymakers are generally most concerned about improving the lives of the worst-off members of society. Identifying these people can be challenging. We take various measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) as indicators of the how well people are doing in life and employ Latent Class Analysis to identify those with greatest propensity to be among the worst-off in a nationally representative sample of over 215,000 people in the United Kingdom. Our results have important implications for how best to analyse data on SWB and who to target when looking to improve the lives of those with the lowest SWB (The authors owe a massive debt of gratitude to the Office for National Statistics for their support throughout this research. We are particularly grateful to Dawn Snape and Eleanor Rees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, to Salah Mehad for the thorough review of methodology, and to Vahe Nafilyan for advice on clustering analysis. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for the very helpful comments. Thank you all very much.).