Biased Policy Professionals
A large literature focuses on the biases of individuals and consumers, as well as "nudges" and other policies that can address those biases. Although policy decisions are often more consequential than those of individual consumers, there...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/685691498482210671/Biased-policy-professionals http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27611 |
| Summary: | A large literature focuses on the biases
of individuals and consumers, as well as "nudges"
and other policies that can address those biases. Although
policy decisions are often more consequential than those of
individual consumers, there is a dearth of studies on the
biases of policy professionals: those who prepare and
implement policy on behalf of elected politicians.
Experiments conducted on a novel subject pool of development
policy professionals (public servants of the World Bank and
the Department for International Development in the United
Kingdom) show that policy professionals are indeed subject
to decision making traps, including sunk cost bias, the
framing of losses and gains, frame-dependent risk-aversion,
and, most strikingly, confirmation bias correlated with
ideological priors, despite having an explicit mission to
promote evidence-informed and impartial decision making.
These findings should worry policy professionals and their
principals in governments and large organizations, as well
as citizens themselves. A further experiment, in which
policy professionals engage in discussion, shows that
deliberation may be able to mitigate the effects of some of
these biases. |
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