Suchergebnisse

AbstractMany institutions, large or small, make their decisions through some process of deliberation. Nonetheless, deliberating institutions often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. Micro mistakes can lead to macro blunders or even catastrophes. There are four such failures; all of them have implication for large-scale institutions as well as small ones. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of an institution's members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Institutions fall victim to cascade effects, as the initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Non-disclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, deliberating institutions sometimes end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating institutions, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that institutions do not learn what their members know. Informational signals and reputational pressure help to explain all four errors. The results can be harmful to numerous institutions, including large ones, and to societies as a whole. Markets are able to correct some of these problems, but cascade effects occur there as well.

AbstractWe propose that individual differences in the value placed on the principle of moderation exist and influence many aspects of consumer decision-making. The idea that moderation is an important guiding norm of human behavior is prevalent throughout history and an explicit theme in many philosophies, religions, and cultures. Yet, moderation has not been studied as an individual-level determinant of consumer behavior. We develop a scale that measures the degree to which individuals have a Preference for Moderation (PFM). The PFM scale predicts consequential behavior in many decision contexts. We first report on scale development, including the generation and selection of items. We then report analyses showing that PFM is distinct from several popular individual-difference variables. Related to cultural background, PFM reliably predicts the use of compromise (study 1) and balancing (vs. highlighting) strategies (study 2), as well as various decision-making behaviors, including reliance on the representativeness heuristic (study 3), self-reported financial habits and outcomes (studies 4–5), real-world online-reviewing behavior (study 6), and split-ticket voting behavior in the 2018 US midterm elections (study 7).