CHOICES FOR GLOBAL SOCIAL STABILITY

Choices for Global Social Stability

Scientists and societal leaders increasingly agree that human activity is irretrievably changing the environment in which human life and other life forms co-exist. Action to reduce human impact on the environment is an imperative prerequisite to achieving social stability. Accelerating migration patterns due to environmental stress and population pressure have been associated with emerging conf...

Rational Choices - Social Contexts

In neoclassical economic theory, rational actors are very simple entities: they know everything, they value more better than less, and given a decision situation with certain physical constraints they are able to calculate the optimal outcome and to behave accordingly (cf. Kiser/Ostrom). Any form of social interaction enters the decision situation as an additional constraint. Relaxing the condi...

Reasoning about social choices and social relationships

We study inferences about social choices—choices that affect people besides the chooser. Social choices depend on the relationships between the people involved: for example, whether they are friends, strangers, or enemies. We propose that these different social relationships correspond to different ways in which the chooser weights another person’s utility relative to her own. We describe a pro...

Global health as a factor in economic and social stability.

Social comparison and risky choices

Theories (and experiments) on decision making under risk typically ignore (and exclude) a social context. We explore whether this omission is detrimental. To do so we experimentally investigate the simplest possible situation with both social comparison and risk: participants choose between two lotteries while a referent faces a fixed payoff. Participants are more risk averse when they can earn...