Situational Crime Prevention and its Discontents: Rational Choice Theory versus the 'Culture of Now'

The rational choice theory of crime and its cognate field of study, situational crime prevention, have exerted a considerable influence in criminal justice policy and criminology. This article argues that, while undeniably useful as a means of reducing property or acquisitive crime, rational choice‐inspired situational crime prevention initiatives are limited when it comes to offering protection against a growing number of so‐called ‘expressive crimes’. Developing this critique, the article will criticize the sociologically hollow narrative associated with rational choice theories of crime by drawing on recent research in social theory and consumer studies. It argues that the growing tendency among many young individuals to engage in certain forms of criminal decision‐making ‘strategies’ may simply be the by‐product of a series of subjectivities and emotions that reflect the material values and cultural logic associated with late modern consumerism.     

The Collapsing Choice Theory: Dissociating Choice and Judgment in Decision Making

Decision making theory in general, and mental models in particular, associate judgment and choice. Decision choice follows probability estimates and errors in choice derive mainly from errors in judgment. In the studies reported here we use the Monty Hall dilemma to illustrate that judgment and choice do not always go together, and that such a dissociation can lead to better decision-making. Specifically, we demonstrate that in certain decision problems, exceeding working memory limitations can actually improve decision choice. We show across four experiments that increasing the number of choice alternatives forces people to collapse choices together, resulting in better decision-making. While choice performance improves, probability judgments do not change, thus demonstrating an important dissociation between choice and probability judgments. We propose the Collapsing Choice Theory (CCT) which explains how working memory capacity, probability estimation, choice alternatives, judgment, and regret all interact and effect decision quality.      

Indecisiveness aversion and preference for commitment

We present an axiomatic model of preferences over menus that is motivated by three assumptions. First, the decision maker is uncertain ex ante (i.e., at the time of choosing a menu) about her ex post (i.e., at the time of choosing an option within her chosen menu) preferences over options, and she anticipates that this subjective uncertainty will not resolve before the ex post stage. Second, she is averse to ex post indecisiveness (i.e., to having to choose between options that she cannot rank with certainty). Third, when evaluating a menu she discards options that are dominated (i.e., inferior to another option whatever her ex post preferences may be) and restricts attention to the undominated ones. Under these assumptions, the decision maker has a preference for commitment in the sense of preferring menus with fewer undominated alternatives. We derive a representation in which the decision maker’s uncertainty about her ex post preferences is captured by means of a subjective state space, which in turn determines which options are undominated in a given menu, and in which the decision maker fears, whenever indecisive, to choose an option that will turn out to be the worst (undominated) one according to the realization of her ex post preferences.     

Model for the distribution process of attitudes in a two-party-system

This article considers a social system where a political decision is to be made. Only two alternatives are permitted: YES or NO. Within the total population A there are two groups, one (X) campaigns for a YES decision, the other one (Y) argues for a NO decision. It is assumed that every individual within the total population has the same opportunities in the field of communications. The question to be answered is as follows: How are the opinions within the total population A distributed after a certain length of time. In our model we use a quantitative concept: The ‘Influence of Opinion in a Two-Party-System’. It is assumed that the relative influence of a group of people having a certain opinion is the stronger, the faster they are able to publicize their decision within the total population A. This and other assumptions (axioms) are formulated more precisely in the following discussion.     

Access, Choice and Travel: Implications for Health Policy

The UK National Health Service is introducing policies offering patients a choice of the hospital where they would like to be treated. ‘Patient choice’ policies form part of a wider debate about the access to health care and the interaction between providers (including information, provision, performance and reputation) and patients (including knowledge, resources and willingness to travel). As the hospital of ‘choice’ might not necessarily be the ‘local’ provider, such policy developments are predicated on an assumption that some patients will be willing to travel further. This will, in turn, affect patients’ access to services. In general, use of services decreases with distance but this is dependent on accessibility to services, the organization of those services, the socio‐economic characteristics of the patient, perceptions of the provider and the condition for which they are to be treated. This article reviews the evidence on patients’ willingness to travel in terms of access to health care and assesses the emerging implications of and for current UK policy on patient choice.     

Two envelopes

“You have been given either envelopeA orB. B contains either one-half or twice the money inA. Do you want to switch? Now you open your envelope? Are you still happy to stand pat?” Answers depend on whether you think there is an upper bound to the money inA. You should no longer be indifferent if you think there is not an upper bound, but, if you think there is a certain upper boundU, you should want to switch or not depending on whether your envelope holds less thanU. Expected monetary values are extended to acts with infinitely many equally possible monetary values. It is maintained that though strong dominance under infinite partitions does not in the absence of an upper bound for values imply greater expected value, ‘univocal strong dominance’ is even then properly decisive for choice.     

Autonomy,Choice and Control for Older Users of Home Care Services: Current Developments in Swedish Eldercare

In Sweden, a policy shift towards more individualized eldercare, with an emphasis on consumer choice, has taken place. The aim of this study was to analyze the processes and practices of individualized eldercare, focusing on preconditions for older peoples’ choice and control. Data consist of qualitative interviews with users of home care services (n – 12) and staff (n – 12) and participant observations (n – 7) of meetings between staff and older people. The choice and control available to older users emerged as decisions about ‘what’ care and services, ‘who’ should provide the care and services, and ‘how’ the care and services should be performed. Three approaches to enable older people choice and control over their home care services were revealed: test and revise, services elaborated in close collaboration between users, care managers and home care staff; choices in the moment, users could choose services at each occasion; and quality improvement through competition, competing providers develop attractive services. The findings could guide policy makers in combining the strengths of these approaches to enable older people in need of support to become co-producers in designing, managing, as well as consuming, care and services. Future quantitative research is needed to achieve generalizable knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of different ways to organize eldercare services.     

Is diversity in capabilities desirable when adding decision makers?

When the benefit of making a correct decision is sufficiently high, even a slight increase in the probability of making such a decision justifies an increase in the number of decision makers. Applying a standard uncertain dichotomous choice benchmark setting, this study focuses on the relative desirability of two alternatives: adding individuals with capabilities identical to the existing ones and adding identical individuals with mean-preserving capabilities that depend on the states of nature. Our main result establishes that when the group applies the simple majority rule, variability in the capabilities of the new decision makers under the two states of nature, which is commonly observed in various decision-making settings, is less desirable in terms of the probability of making the correct decision.     

Are Quasi‐markets in Education what the British Public Wants?

In the context of inconclusive evidence on the extrinsic successes of quasi‐markets, policy defences of school choice and competition in education have often discussed the intrinsic, empowering value of choice for consumers, arguing that school choice for parents is ‘what people want’. Discourses often imply that choice is desired for its own sake rather than merely as a means by which families can escape what are deemed to be poor quality schools. Support for an idealistic, abstract notion of ‘choice’ is also taken to imply support for quasi‐markets overall and is not considered alongside possible competing values that people may hold at the same time as they value choice. Additionally, views of parents are often examined without considering possible differences in views between parents and non‐parents. Contributing to debates about how far a public desire exists for quasi‐markets in education, this article draws on data from newly designed questions fielded as part of the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey. The article finds that while choice ‘in the abstract’ is supported widely by both parents and non‐parents (albeit slightly more so by parents), a valuing of choice among the British public appears to be more instrumental than intrinsic – potentially problematic given evidence on the extrinsic benefits of quasi‐markets is mixed. Support for choice is tempered among parents and non‐parents by clear opposition to vouchers, school diversity, government spending on transport costs to facilitate choice and by strong support for the idea of sending children to the ‘nearest state school’.     

A Method for Eliciting Utilities and its Application to Collective Choice

Designing a mechanism that provides a direct incentive for an individual to report her utility function over several alternatives is a difficult task. A framework for such mechanism design is the following: an individual (a decision maker) is faced with an optimization problem (e.g., maximization of expected utility), and a mechanism designer observes the decision maker’s action. The mechanism does reveal the individual’s utility truthfully if the mechanism designer, having observed the decision maker’s action, infers the decision maker’s utilities over several alternatives. This paper studies an example of such a mechanism and discusses its application to the problem of optimal social choice. Under certain simplifying assumptions about individuals’ utility functions and about how voters choose their voting strategies, this mechanism selects the alternative that maximizes Harsanyi’s social utility function and is Pareto-efficient.     

Feddersen and Pesendorfer meet Ellsberg

The Condorcet Jury Theorem formalises the “wisdom of crowds”: binary decisions made by majority vote are asymptotically correct as the number of voters tends to infinity. This classical result assumes like-minded, expected utility maximising voters who all share a common prior belief about the right decision. Ellis (Theor Econo 11(3): 865–895, 2016) shows that when voters have ambiguous prior beliefs—a (closed, convex) set of priors—and follow maxmin expected utility (MEU), such wisdom requires that voters’ beliefs satisfy a “disjoint posteriors” condition: different private signals lead to posterior sets with disjoint interiors. Both the original theorem and Ellis’s generalisation assume symmetric penalties for wrong decisions. If, as in the jury context, errors attract asymmetric penalties then it is natural to consider voting rules that raise the hurdle for the decision carrying the heavier penalty for error (such as conviction in jury trials). In a classical model, Feddersen and Pesendorfer (Am Politi Sci Rev 92(1):23–35, 1998) have shown that, paradoxically, raising this hurdle may actually increase the likelihood of the more serious error. In particular, crowds are not wise under the unanimity rule: the probability of the more serious error does not vanish as the crowd size tends to infinity. We show that this “Jury Paradox” persists in the presence of ambiguity, whether or not juror beliefs satisfy Ellis’s “disjoint posteriors” condition. We also characterise the strictly mixed equilibria of this model and study their properties. Such equilibria cannot exist in the absence of ambiguity but may exist for arbitrarily large jury size when ambiguity is present. In addition to uninformative strictly mixed equilibria, analogous to those exhibited by Ellis (Theor Econo 11(3): 865–895, 2016), there may also exist strictly mixed equilibria which are informative about voter signals.

     

Accepting and Negotiating Service Users' Choices in Mental Health Transition Meetings

Across Western welfare regimes, policies emphasize that service users should have more choices regarding their services. This article examines how service choices are presented, responded to and decided in interactions between service users and professionals in mental health transition meetings. Choice is often associated with consumerist user involvement ideas, but in mental health choice also relates to the democratic user involvement approach and to shared decision making between professionals and service users. The results of the study show that professionals construct service users as consumers by offering service options in choice making sequences, expecting users to make appropriate choices. Service users mostly act like consumers by responding to these choice options. However, the study also demonstrates that the professionals do not always accept the user's first choice but respond to them as non‐preferred. Sometimes, they also suggest choices on behalf of the users. In these ‘non‐accepting’ sequences, choices are negotiated in interaction between the parties, rather than users acting as autonomous choice makers. The sequences are based on two kinds of professional reasoning: first, the professional‐led needs assessment and, second, the structure of the service package that the user is being offered. This negotiation has elements of shared decision making and the ‘logic of care’. But it also has elements of paternalist control which challenge both consumerist and democratic service user involvement and suggests consideration of more collectively oriented service user actions.     

Better May be Worse: Some Monotonicity Results and Paradoxes in Discrete Choice Under Uncertainty

It is not unusual in real-life that one has to choose among finitely many alternatives when the merit of each alternative is not perfectly known. Instead of observing the actual utilities of the alternatives at hand, one typically observes more or less precise signals that are positively correlated with these utilities. In addition, the decision-maker may, at some cost or disutility of effort, choose to increase the precision of these signals, for example by way of a careful study or the hiring of expertise. We here develop a model of such decision problems. We begin by showing that a version of the monotone likelihood-ratio property is sufficient, and also essentially necessary, for the optimality of the heuristic decision rule to always choose the alternative with the highest signal. Second, we show that it is not always advantageous to face alternatives with higher utilities, a non-monotonicity result that holds even if the decision-maker optimally chooses the signal precision. We finally establish an operational first-order condition for the optimal precision level in a canonical class of decision-problems, and we show that the optimal precision level may be discontinuous in the precision cost.     

A multiattribute decision time theory

In this study, we analyze choice in the presence of some conflict that affects the decision time (response time), a subject that has been documented in the literature. We axiomatize a multiattribute decision time (MDT) representation, which is a dynamic extension of the classic multiattribute expected utility theory that allows potentially incomplete preferences. Under this framework, one alternative is preferred to another in a certain period if and only if the weighted sum of the attribute-dependent expected utility induced by the former alternative is larger than that induced by the latter for all attribute weights in a closed and convex set. MDT uniquely determines the decision time as the earliest period at which the ranking between alternatives becomes decisive. The comparative statics result indicates that the decision time provides useful information to locate indifference curves in a specific setting. MDT also explains various empirical findings in economics and other relevant fields.     

The cognitive approach to information-seeking behaviour and information use

The cognitive approach to ‘information behaviour’ centres upon the idea of meaning. Meaning is involved not only in all aspects of information generation, transfer and use, but also in the way people define themselves, their lives and their actions.The cognitive approach, therefore, draws attention to the need for a bridge between the meanings of everyday life and the information that may have relevance for everyday life. In this sense, of course, ‘everyday life’ is different for every person—for some it may involve research as an everyday activity, for others the practice of a profession, for others, involvement in business and commerce.The aim of this paper will be to explore these concepts in the context of research into information behaviour in the everyday world of work, where individuals may be constrained to a greater or lesser degree in their ability to define the content, direction and function of their work and where the diversity of roles may prevent the emergence of coherent groups capable of expressing clear needs for information support.De Mey's presentation of the ‘cognitive paradigm’ will be examined and parallels to elements of such a ‘paradigm’ will be sought in the world of work.Throughout, the paper will draw upon the author's present and past research.     

Sampling experience reverses preferences for ambiguity

People often need to choose between alternatives with known probabilities (risk) and alternatives with unknown probabilities (ambiguity). Such decisions are characterized by attitudes towards ambiguity, which are distinct from risk attitudes. Most studies of ambiguity attitudes have focused on the static case of single choice, where decision makers typically prefer risky over ambiguous prospects. However, in many situations, decision makers may be able to sample outcomes of an ambiguous alternative, allowing for inferences about its probabilities. The current paper finds that such sampling experience reverses the pattern of ambiguity attitude observed in the static case. This effect can only partly be explained by the updating of probabilistic beliefs, suggesting a direct effect of sampling on attitudes toward ambiguity.     

‘q-Pareto-Scalar’ Two-Stage Extremization Model and its Reducibility to One-Stage Model

A two-stage sequential choice model is studied, the first stage being defined by q-Pareto multicriterial choice rule, and the second stage being defined by scalar extremization model. In this model, at the first stage the q-Pareto rule choses alternatives which are not only undominated in terms of Pareto comparison, but also includes into choice the alternatives which are dominated by no more than q alternatives. Since the choice set of the first-stage usually contains too many elements, obtained set is used as a presentation for the second stage constructed by a scalar extremization model. The properties of the model are studied as well as its representability to one-stage scalar extremization model.