Institutions, motivation, and preferences: exploring interdisciplinarity

• Grant number: 21/12218-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: August 26, 2022
• End date: February 16, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Economic Theory
• Principal Investigator: David Dequech Filho
• Grantee: David Dequech Filho
• Host Investigator: Jack Knight
• Host Institution: Instituto de Economia (IE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Duke University, United States

Abstract

This research is part of an attempt to contribute to the theory of the interactions between institutions, on the one hand, and the behavior and the thought of economic agents, on the other. More specifically, it has to main objectives. The first is to investigate the motivational influence of institutions on individuals. Such an influence is divided into two: (a) the incentivizing influence consists in providing incentives to agents; (b) the profound motivational influence occurs on the objectives that agents pursue, on the obligations they attribute to themselves, and on the values they uphold. The possibility of the incentivizing influence being transformed into a profound one is discussed. Also examined are various aspects of the interaction between the motivational and the cognitive influences of institutions. The second main objective is to analyze the relation between the motivational influence and preferences. After distinguishing between alternative notions of preference and separating preferences from institutional incentives as soft constraints, it is argued that the proposition that institutions influence preferences may not correspond to the proposition that institutions have a profound motivational influence. For this purpose, three aspects of the relation between preferences and profound motivations are considered: (a) in the "as if" version of the utility maximization hypothesis, preferences do not need to be actual motivations; (b) it is important to distinguish between hard and soft obligations, since obligations that are not the object of choice and trade-off are not adequately represented as preferences; (c) some behaviors that are manifestations of habits do not involve choice, and some habits may be originated without choice. (AU)