Does the Political Process Mitigate or Accentuate Individual Biases due to Mispredicting Future Utility?

Abstract

Abstract: In important situations, individual decision-making is systematically biased. When deciding (rather than consuming), extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. People overestimate extrinsic attributes and therefore put too much effort into acquiring income and gaining status, lowering their utility level. These mistakes are accentuated in authoritarian systems and at least carried forward in a perfectly competitive democratic system of party competition. In modern democracies, public discourse puts people’s partial awareness of their anomalous behavior on the political agenda. Various policies can help people to overcome biases due to misprediction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.