Ex ante or preventive debiasing interventions fall in turn into two broad categories. Some of the most promising are designed to modify the environment in which the judgment or decision takes place. Such modifications, or nudges, as they are known, aim to reduce the effect of biases or even to enlist biases to produce a better decision. A simple example is automatic enrollment in pension plans. Designed to overcome inertia, procrastination, and optimistic bias, automatic enrollment ensures that employees will be saving for retirement unless they deliberately opt out.
