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Interventions to change everyday behaviors often attempt to change people's beliefs and intentions. As the authors explain, these interventions are unlikely to be an effective means to change behaviors that people have repeated into habits. Successful habit change interventions involve disrupting the environmental factors that automatically cue habit performance. The authors propose two potential habit change interventions. "Downstream-plus" interventions provide informational input at points when habits are vulnerable to change, such as when people are undergoing naturally occurring changes in performance environments for many everyday actions (e.g., moving households, changing jobs). "Upstream" interventions occur before habit performance and disrupt old environmental cues and establish new ones. Policy interventions can be oriented not only to the change of established habits but also to the acquisition and maintenance of new behaviors through the formation of new habits.

This article considers several aspects of the economic decision making of the poor from the perspective of behavioral economics, and it focuses on potential contributions from marketing. Among other things, the authors consider some relevant facets of the social and institutional environments in which the poor interact, and they review some behavioral patterns that are likely to arise in these contexts. A behaviorally more informed perspective can help make sense of what might otherwise be considered "puzzles" in the economic comportment of the poor. A behavioral analysis suggests that substantial welfare changes could result from relatively minor policy interventions, and insightful marketing may provide much needed help in the design of such interventions.

This paper describes a particular perspective on the causes of poverty: a memberships based theory. The idea of this theory is that an individual's socioeconomic prospects are strongly influenced by the groups to which he is attached over the course of his life. Such groups may be endogenous; examples include residential neighborhoods, schools and firms. Other groups are exogenous, including ethnicity and gender. I describe the main ideas of the memberships theory, characterize the empirical evidence in its support, and remark on its implications for anti-poverty policy.