Based on a series of pathbreaking lectures given at Yale University in 2012, this powerful, thought-provoking work by national best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein combines legal theory with ...behavioral economics to make a fresh argument about the legitimate scope of government, bearing on obesity, smoking, distracted driving, health care, food safety, and other highly volatile, high-profile public issues. Behavioral economists have established that people often make decisions that run counter to their best interests-producing what Sunstein describes as "behavioral market failures." Sometimes we disregard the long term; sometimes we are unrealistically optimistic; sometimes we do not see what is in front of us. With this evidence in mind, Sunstein argues for a new form of paternalism, one that protects people against serious errors but also recognizes the risk of government overreaching and usually preserves freedom of choice.Against those who reject paternalism of any kind, Sunstein shows that "choice architecture"-government-imposed structures that affect our choices-is inevitable, and hence that a form of paternalism cannot be avoided. He urges that there are profoundly moral reasons to ensure that choice architecture is helpful rather than harmful-and that it makes people's lives better and longer.
It is increasingly common for analysts to seek out the opinions of individuals and organizations using attitudinal scales such as degree of satisfaction or importance attached to an issue. Examples ...include levels of obesity, seriousness of a health condition, attitudes towards service levels, opinions on products, voting intentions, and the degree of clarity of contracts. Ordered choice models provide a relevant methodology for capturing the sources of influence that explain the choice made amongst a set of ordered alternatives. The methods have evolved to a level of sophistication that can allow for heterogeneity in the threshold parameters, in the explanatory variables (through random parameters), and in the decomposition of the residual variance. This book brings together contributions in ordered choice modeling from a number of disciplines, synthesizing developments over the last fifty years, and suggests useful extensions to account for the wide range of sources of influence on choice.
This book completes Margaret Archer's trilogy investigating the role of reflexivity in mediating between structure and agency. What do young people want from life? Using analysis of family ...experiences and life histories, her argument respects the properties and powers of both structures and agents and presents the 'internal conversation' as the site of their interplay. In unpacking what 'social conditioning' means, Archer demonstrates the usefulness of 'relational realism'. She advances a new theory of relational socialisation, appropriate to the 'mixed messages' conveyed in families that are rarely normatively consensual and thus cannot provide clear guidelines for action. Life-histories are analysed to explain the making and breaking of the various modes of reflexivity. Different modalities have been dominant from early societies to the present and the author argues that modernity is slowly ceding place to a 'morphogenetic society' as meta-reflexivity now begins to predominate, at least amongst educated young people.
Managers face a critical issue in deciding when to employ a predictive planning approach versus a more adaptive and flexible strategic approach. We suggest that determining which approach is ideal ...for a given context hangs on the extent to which uncertainty is, or might be, mitigable within that context. To date, however, the mitigability of uncertainty has not been adequately distilled. Here, we take on this issue, distinguishing mitigable ignorance of pertinent but knowable information (i.e., "epistemic uncertainty") from immitigable indeterminacy (i.e., "aleatory uncertainty"). We review the current state of the debate on the existence of free will, because the acceptance or rejection of conscious agents as a true first cause has fundamental implications. A critical examination of the arguments for and against the free will hypothesis land us on the side of voluntarism, which implies immitigable indeterminacy (but not complete unpredictability) wherever conscious actors are involved. Accepting the existence of immitigable or aleatory uncertainty, then, we revisit the determination of strategic logics and produce important theoretical nuance and key boundary conditions in the normative choice between predictive and nonpredictive strategies.
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This study has as prime objective to analyze the psychometric properties of the Behavioral Regulation Exercise Questionnaire (BREQ-3) in a sample of Portuguese exercisers and invariance across ...gender. Two independent samples (448 calibration; 374 validation), aged between 16 and 78 years (
= 40.29;
= 16.24), of both gender, (495 female; 327 male) were enrolled in this study. The results show that the original model (six factors; 24 items) did not fit to the data in a satisfactory way (χ
= 977.49; df = 237; B-S
< 0.001; SRMR = 0.07; NNFI = 0.80; CFI = 0.83; RMSEA = 0.08; 90% CI = 0.08-0.09). After removing six items (one for each factor), the model (six factors; 18 items) adjustment improved in a satisfactory way in both samples: calibration (χ
= 331.86; df = 120; B-S
< 0.001; SRMR = 0.06; NNFI = 0.91; CFI = 0.93; RMSEA = 0.06; 90% CI 0.06-0.07) and validation (χ
= 254.08; df = 120; B-S
< 0.001; SRMR = 0.04; NNFI = 0.93; CFI = 0.95; RMSEA = 0.06; 90% CI = 0.05-0.06). Results also showed model invariance across gender (ΔCFI ≤ 0.01). The Portuguese version of BREQ-3 (six factors; 18 items) is a valid and reliable measurement instrument to measure behavior regulation underlying self-determination theory in the exercise domain. However, the evidence also indicated that additional studies are needed to address the fragilities of the original model (six factors; 24 items).
Efficient coding of subjective value Polanía, Rafael; Woodford, Michael; Ruff, Christian C
Nature neuroscience,
01/2019, Volume:
22, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Preference-based decisions are essential for survival, for instance, when deciding what we should (not) eat. Despite their importance, preference-based decisions are surprisingly variable and can ...appear irrational in ways that have defied mechanistic explanations. Here we propose that subjective valuation results from an inference process that accounts for the structure of values in the environment and that maximizes information in value representations in line with demands imposed by limited coding resources. A model of this inference process explains the variability in both subjective value reports and preference-based choices, and predicts a new preference illusion that we validate with empirical data. Interestingly, the same model explains the level of confidence associated with these reports. Our results imply that preference-based decisions reflect information-maximizing transmission and statistically optimal decoding of subjective values by a limited-capacity system. These findings provide a unified account of how humans perceive and valuate the environment to optimally guide behavior.
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How much choice do you have in life? Charles Dickens's dramatisation of the relationship between characters and their audiences within his novels reflects upon us: in spectating spectators, readers ...engage in a dynamic of sameness and difference that will define and decide the struggle for choice in our own lives.
Simple choices (e.g., eating an apple vs. an orange) are made by integrating noisy evidence that is sampled over time and influenced by visual attention; as a result, fluctuations in visual attention ...can affect choices. But what determines what is fixated and when? To address this question, we model the decision process for simple choice as an information sampling problem, and approximate the optimal sampling policy. We find that it is optimal to sample from options whose value estimates are both high and uncertain. Furthermore, the optimal policy provides a reasonable account of fixations and choices in binary and trinary simple choice, as well as the differences between the two cases. Overall, the results show that the fixation process during simple choice is influenced dynamically by the value estimates computed during the decision process, in a manner consistent with optimal information sampling.
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This book outlines a new approach to the analysis of decision making based on "cognitive maps." A cognitive map is a graphic representation intended to capture the structure of a decision maker's ...stated beliefs about a particular problem. Following introductory chapters that develop the theory and techniques of cognitive mapping, a set of five empirical studies applies these new techniques to five policy areas.
Originally published in 1976.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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