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AbstractWe examine the role of status quo bias in the ballot wording of social issues that affect the rights of minority groups. We test the salience of this framing bias by conducting an experiment that randomly assigns different ballot wordings for five policies across survey respondents. We find that status quo bias changes the percent of individuals who vote for the ballot measure by 5–8 percentage points with the least informed individuals being the most affected by status quo bias.

The UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recently recommended against vaccinating children under 16 against Covid, despite granting that "the benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms." (Of course, aggregated over a subpopulation of millions, even "marginal" improvements in risk profile can result in several saved lives and scores or hundreds fewer hospitalizations.  And, as Deepti Gurdasani makes clear in this thread,* all the evidence should lead us to expect the "unknown" risks from Covid to outweigh those from the vaccine, so taking uncertainty into account should lead us to regard vaccination as all the more important.)So what's behind the JCVI's verdict?  They are at least admirably transparent:In providing its advice, JCVI also recognises that in relation to childhood immunisation programmes, the UK public places a higher relative value on safety compared to benefits.It's important to be clear on what this really means. Note that this is not invoking any kind of philosophically defensible harm/benefit asymmetry.  (Many people think it's more important to reduce suffering than to promote happiness, but that's not what this is about.)  Vaccines aren't to make you happy. The "benefits" they provide are specifically safety benefits, i.e. against other health risks.  So what the JCVI is really saying is that they place higher value on protecting people from potential harms from vaccines than on protecting people from potential harms from COVID.That is deeply messed up.I just hope that greater philosophical clarity here will help people to see how messed up it is (and so change these institutions' values in future).  Every time some dopey bureaucrat claims they're prioritizing "vaccine safety" over "benefits", they need to be met with the response: No, you're prioritizing safety from vaccines over safety from COVID.That's clearly indefensible.  We just need to make it clear that this is in fact what they are doing.  Don't let them obscure the reality of status quo risks behind a weasel-word like "benefits".  The choice isn't between "safety vs benefits", it's "safety [against lesser vaccine risks] vs safety [against greater covid risks]".* = Thanks to Dan Fogal for the pointer.

Is there an opposition bias in ballot initiative campaigns? While some early research suggested that the "no" side was advantaged in ballot initiative campaigns, recent work has demonstrated that both opposition and support spending in ballot measure campaigns are effective. We offer a new way to conceptualize status quo orientation in ballot measure elections. Specifically, we argue that opposition arguments are more effective than support arguments because of the well-known framing negativity bias and not because the starting position for uninformed voters is to default to no. We present the results of two survey experiments to test the impact of support and opposition arguments in ballot initiative campaigns. We find consistent evidence that opposition arguments are effective in generating more "no" votes and that support arguments are ineffective in generating more "yes" votes.

Abstract
In a setting of choice with an observable status quo, we model an agent who struggles with temptation by exercising (costly) self-control, and who views the status quo as a commitment opportunity that allows him to avoid the self-control costs incurred when making an active choice. Our model is rational in that the agent always maximizes the same ex-post utility function; hence, when the standard indirect utility property holds, the model reduces to classic rational choice model. However, when we allow for costly self-control, our theory provides a rationale for three well-documented phenomena that cannot be captured by the standard model: the status-quo bias, the compromise effect, and the satisficing choice procedure (when ignoring the information on the status quo). A notable feature of our theory is that while it relaxes the indirect utility property, it still allows for a complete identification of an agent's preference relation over menus. This is found to be important in many practical situations.

In einem liberalisierten Elektrizitätsmarkt haben heutzutage alle Konsumenten die Chance sich für einen beliebigen Stromvertrag zu entscheiden. Ein Großteil der Bevölkerung erklärt sich in empirischen Untersuchungen zur Präferenzerfassung zu einem Wechsel vom aktuellen zu einem neuen Stromvertag, der erneuerbare Energien unterstützt, bereit. Die tatsächlichen Wechselraten bleiben jedoch trotzdem seit Jahren hinter den Erwartungen zurück. Angenommen dass Konsumenten also den Nutzen der Förderung erneuerbarer Energien verstehen und unterstützen, sollten sie nach der Theorie des rationalen Entscheidens auch diese Alternative wählen. Jedoch kann gezeigt werden, dass Konsumenten vielmehr dazu neigen am Status Quo festzuhalten, wenn ein Wechsel mit zusätzlichem Aufwand und damit Kosten verbunden ist. In bisherigen Studien zu Konsumentenpräferenzen wird ein derartiger Status Quo Bias methodisch nicht berücksichtigt. Zur Untersuchung ob im Wechselverhalten in wiederholten Entscheidungen zwischen verschiedenen Alternativen die exogene Festlegung einer Alternative als Status Quo dazu führt, dass diese signifikant häufiger gewählt wird, wurde ein Laborexperiment durchgeführt. Anhand einer modifizierten auswahlbasierten Conjointanalyse sollten Probanden Einblicke in ihre Präferenzen zwischen verschiedenen Stromverträgen geben. Während sich die Probanden in der Kontrollgruppe unvoreingenommen zwischen den Alternativen entschieden, war in der Experimentalgruppe eine Alternative als Status Quo vorausgewählt. Über die wiederholte Auswahlentscheidung wurden Teilnutzenwerte und relative Wichtigkeiten für verschiedene Attributausprägungen bestimmt. Eine dieser Attributausprägungen war dabei der Anteil erneuerbarer Energien am Strommix. Die Ergebnisse demonstrieren, dass signifikante Unterschiede zwischen den Teilnutzenwerten und den relativen Wichtigkeiten der Attribute bestehen. Entgegen der Erwartung der Theorie rationalen Entscheidens beeinflusst die exogene Vorgabe eines Status Quo demnach das Entscheidungsverhalten der Individuen. Eine Interpretation dieser Ergebnisse lässt den Schluss zu, dass sich über wirtschaftspolitische Eingriffe so die Diskrepanz zwischen der Unterstützung für erneuerbare Energien in der Gesellschaft und der tatsächlichen Förderung lösen lässt. Eine Form dieses Eingriffs könnte dabei die Vorgabe sein, dass Stromanbieter ihren Basisvertrag auf einen erneuerbaren Stromvertrag umstellen und damit die Wahrscheinlichkeit erhöhen, dass mehr Konsumenten bei diesem Vertrag bleiben. Der libertäre Paternalismus kann hierbei ein geeignetes theoretisches Konstrukt bieten, wie solche staatlichen Eingriffe unter Wahrung der Konsumentensouveränität aussehen können. ; In a liberalized electricity market all consumers have the chance to opt for any electricity contract. In empirical studies so far a major part of the population agrees on the preference to switch from the current to a new electricity contract that supports renewable energies. The actual switching rates, however, have fallen short of expectations for years. So according to the rational decision theory, assuming that consumers understand and support the benefits of promoting renewable energy, they should choose this alternative. However, it can be shown that consumers tend to stay with the status quo if a change involves additional effort and thus costs. In the methodology of previous studies on consumer preferences, such a status quo bias has not been considered. A laboratory experiment was conducted to find out whether the exogenous determination of an alternative as a status quo in repeated decisions between different alternatives leads to a significantly more frequent choice. Using a modified choice-based conjoint analysis subjects should give insights into their preferences between different electricity contracts. While the subjects in the control group decided freely between the alternatives one option was pre-selected as a status quo in the experimental group. The repeated choices were used to determine part-worth utilities and relative importance for different attribute levels. One of these attributes was the share of renewable energies in the electricity mix. The results demonstrate that there are significant differences between the part-worth utilities and the relative importance of the attributes. Contrary to the assumptions of the theory of rational decision-making, the exogenous determination of a status quo thus influences the decision-making behavior of individuals. An interpretation of these results suggests that economic policy interventions could resolve the existing gap between support for renewable energy in society and actual funding. One form of intervention could be the requirement for electricity providers to switch their base utility contract to a renewable electricity contract, thereby increasing the likelihood that more consumers will remain with this contract. The idea of libertarian paternalism can provide a suitable theoretical construct as to how such governmental interventions can look like while preserving consumer sovereignty.