Launched in 2012 by Dr. Halpern with the support of the Otto Haas Charitable Trust, the Fostering Improvement in End-of-Life Decision Science (FIELDS) Program is the world’s first research program dedicated to using principles of behavioral economics to understand and improve upon the end-of-life decisions made by patients, caregivers, and clinicians.

The mechanistic insights into end-of-life decision making generated by the FIELDS Program often provide the “basic science” upon which scalable interventions tested by the PAIR Center are built. The FIELDS program sits jointly within the PAIR Center and Penn’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE), a sister center of the PAIR Center.