I study how people decide, and try to put it to work for good.
I co-founded the World Bank's behavioral science team with one idea: turn a nerdy niche into everyday language. Today, thanks to colleagues across the Bank, mental models, social norms, beliefs, aspiration and agency shape, in big and small ways, much of its roughly $70 billion a year in lending. One favorite: a short class in Peru taught kids that intelligence can grow, and their math scores went up. Change what people believe is possible, and they do the rest. More and more, that runs through stories and AI, which carry what we learn to the people who need it.
My work sits between economics and psychology, and increasingly it runs through technology and storytelling. Behavioral science complements the rest of the toolkit: it asks what it takes for a decision to actually happen, whether you are a minister designing a program, a family it is meant to reach, or simply human. A school with poor attendance and a clinic nobody uses often share a behavioral cause. That is usually where the useful question is.
I learned to think in experiments from cucumbers. My father was a horticulturist in Cyprus, and as a kid I followed him into the fields where he tested his crops: try something on the left side, leave the right side alone, see what happens. I have been running versions of that experiment ever since.
For my Ph.D. at Berkeley I lived in the Peruvian Andes, collecting data with small potato farmers, asking how they actually decided where to sell. Price was only part of it. Who they knew, what they had heard, and whom they trusted mattered as much. Later, on a cash transfer trial in Nicaragua, much of the impact came from the networks the women built, not from the money alone. Learning from each other, they began to aim higher. People decide inside their relationships, the stories they tell themselves about how the world works, and their sense of what is expected of people like them. That thread runs through everything since, in work with poor communities from Afghanistan to Bangladesh to Nigeria.
As co-founder and head of eMBeD, the World Bank's behavioral science unit, we built an interdisciplinary team to diagnose what drives behavior, then design and test solutions with governments and project teams in more than 100 countries. The unit sits in the Bank's Development Impact Department, whose job is building causal evidence on what actually works. A lot of our work is about the people in charge, too. Ministers, mayors and public officials have the same biases as everyone else, and so do we.
Underneath all of it is one goal: putting tools in people's hands that help them make better decisions, for their own lives and for the lives of others. Much of it comes down to agency, aspiration and hope: the belief that a healthier, happier life is within reach, and worth working for. The job is to help people act on it, openly, and never to decide for them. Some of the work runs through governments and public services. Some of it is building capabilities and jobs. Some of it is telling better stories, with media that reach millions. Some of it is taking on misinformation. More and more, it means working with the private sector as well as the public one, because that is where many of the decisions that shape people's lives are made.
My part is the connective one: seeing how research, policy, markets, and technology fit together, and moving institutions so that what we learn about how people decide actually changes what happens to them. Evidence is only useful if it reaches the people making the decision. So I use knowledge diffusion the way I use behavioral science, as a tool for making sense of things. How does an idea travel, who trusts it, and what makes someone act on it? It is the same question about people, asked about evidence. And I try to keep it fun. Magic, music and stories find their way into the work, because serious ideas land better when people enjoy them.
The question is always the same. Why do people do what they do, and what would change it.
Trust is earned by what a tool refuses to say.
Why these are built the way they are: what I believe about AI for policy, in about four minutes.
An assistant grounded in the World Bank's report base that answers with page-level citations and abstains when the evidence is insufficient. I adapted it to that evidence base and set up its ongoing evaluation, including a peer-reviewed study of how it is actually used in the field. Users who kept going with it reported saving two to four hours a week.
A platform that turns research into structured courses, with AI built into both design and delivery. A personalized AI tutor is in development.
An AI-assisted, editorially controlled podcast distilling recent research into short briefings, published in several language editions. Research nobody has time to read does not get used.
Development projects depend on people acting, yet the communication meant to influence that is briefed as production and rarely measured. STORY works backwards from the outcome instead: segment who needs to act, target message and messenger, test before spending, then measure against the project's own results framework. The first version did not land, so we reworked the user journey and moved the technology behind the scenes.
Built at eMBeD · now in pilot with country teams
From SkillCraft, a tool that helps young jobseekers find their strengths, to Find the Fake, a WhatsApp game tested in Jordan that builds resistance to health misinformation. Podcast episode.
The papers are in the record below. This is the rest: where I have tried to say the same things in plain language. All World Bank posts are on one page.
Notes from building evidence tools for governments. Usage is not impact, and scale is a design choice rather than a hope.
ACM CHI 2026, with Karnatak, Chatila, Pinzón Hernández, Yazdanfar and Dugas. What the first users taught us about citations, abstaining, and time saved.
Entertaining Change: next-generation media partnerships for social impact and gender equality. World Bank, Abuja, October 2025. About the event.
A long conversation with Merle van den Akker on eMBeD, what worked, and what I would do differently.
A short film about the unit and the way it works with governments.
World Bank Blogs, with Tomio, Rawlins, Vongthavilay and Pinzón Hernández.
A Load of BS, with Zeina Afif and Ana María Muñoz Boudet.
World Bank Blogs, with Sousa Lourenço and De Castro Zoratto. Policymakers have biases too.
World Bank Blogs, with Bidani, Menon, Nguyen and Afif.
World Bank Blogs, with Carolina Sánchez-Páramo. The short case for the whole approach.
Ten selected pieces first; the full record of 47 is one click away. Peer-reviewed articles, books and policy volumes, and current working papers. Where a working paper has since been published, only the published version appears.
Google Scholar · 6,300+ citations · h-index 32
I have spent twenty years on how people actually decide, and on designing things that work with the grain of human behavior rather than against it. Economics, psychology, experiments, and lately AI: the discipline follows the problem, not the other way around. If that is what you are working on, I would be glad to compare notes.
Renos Vakis connects behavioral science, evidence and technology to put tools in people's hands that help them make better decisions and act on their aspirations, for their own lives and for the lives of others. As co-founder and head of the Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD) in the World Bank's Development Impact Department, which builds causal evidence on what actually works, he leads an interdisciplinary team working with governments and project teams in more than 100 countries. The work improves lives through several routes: governments and public services; capabilities and jobs; better stories, told through media that reach millions; and the fight against misinformation. Increasingly, it reaches beyond government to the private sector. He uses knowledge diffusion the same way he uses behavioral science, as a tool: how ideas travel, who trusts them, and what makes people act on them. At the World Bank's Institute for Economic Development that work spans learning, impact analytics and applied AI, so that evidence reaches the people making decisions. His interest in evidence began in his father's experimental crop fields in Cyprus and grew through doctoral fieldwork with potato farmers in the Peruvian Andes. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his research has appeared in The Economic Journal, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Science Advances and the Journal of Development Economics. He teaches behavioral insights for policy at the University of Cyprus and advises governments, universities and development partners worldwide. He also brings magic, music and storytelling to the work, on the view that development practice should be engaging as well as rigorous.
Scan to openrenosvakis.io