Paul Dolan

Paul Dolan is an internationally renowned expert on happiness, behaviour and public policy. He is currently a Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of the new Executive MSc in Behavioural Science.

His first achievements were in developing ways of valuing health so that resources can be allocated more efficiently. These contributions were recognised in a professorship in health economics in 2000 (at the age of 32) and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Economics in 2002 for his contribution to health economics and quality-adjusted life years. His research then focused on how to account for fairness in measures of benefit, developing ways to weight QALYs according to potentially important characteristics of the recipient.The policy impact of his work in health was recognised more widely by his appointment in 2008 as Chief Academic Advisor to the UK Government Economic Service on Economic appraisal.

His international reputation has been further advanced by an invitation from Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman to work with him at Princeton in 2004-5. Their 2008 paper in the Economic Journal is the most cited paper in that journal since that year. Since his time at Princeton, he has focussed on more direct measures of wellbeing. He has been developing measures that capture both ‘pleasure’ and ‘purpose. He is a member of the National Wellbeing Advisory Forum for the Office of National Statistics in the UK, and was lead author of a report that made the recommendations to the ONS about what happiness questions to include in large-scale national surveys. He is also advising the National Academy of Sciences in the US on measurement issues in happiness research.

Over the past few years, he has begun exploring the influences of automatic responses on individual behaviour, and how these relate to our preferences, health and wellbeing. He was an author of the “Mindspace” report for the UK Cabinet Office. “Mindspace” is a mnemonic for the nine most robust effects on behaviour that operate largely, but not exclusively, through our automatic system (the part of our brain that responds unconsciously to contextual influences). His work on Mindspace is being used across the public and private sectors, and he is increasingly asked for consultancy advice on how to change behaviour in organisations and populations.