Individual Agency in Behavioral Public Policy: New Knowledge Problems

Speaker: Malte Dold
Abstract: A number of authors have recently begun to argue for agency-enhancing interventions in BPP, such as assistive curing and boosts. Unlike nudges that re-bias people, these psychologically informed policy interventions aim at de-biasing people by enhancing their reasoning capacities. The agency-centric approach to BPP is laudable from a methodological perspective since it addresses the intricacies of context-dependent preferences. It is also laudable from a normative perspective since it takes the liberal idea of individual self-determination seriously. Yet, it creates ‘new’ knowledge problems that have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the literature. This article argues that the epistemic challenge of an agency-centric BPP stems from, among other things, (a) its commitment to algorithmic analysis that models actual decision-making processes (in contrast to a reliance on algebraic analysis and as-if models) and (b) the difficulty to differentiate motivational from epistemic concerns that would allow the analyst to identify reasoning failures. This article discusses these challenges and ultimately defends a psychologically grounded agency-oriented approach to BPP that highlights the value of autonomy, i.e., people’s capacity to scrutinize, act on, and identify with their evolving preferences. Such an approach attenuates some of the epistemic problems by shifting the policy focus from process facilitation and situational choice architecture toward institutional analysis.

Recorded on 22 June 2023 as part of the LSE Hayek Programme- Department of Social Policy Joint BPP seminar series

свернуть