Choice Architecture as a Strategy to Encourage Elegant Infrastructure Outcomes
Publication: Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 23, Issue 1
Abstract
Infrastructure that meets users’ needs with less complexity can satisfy growing demand and relieve system pressures. Such outcomes are defined as elegant. Unfortunately, social and cognitive biases can inhibit infrastructure stakeholders from achieving these outcomes. In other fields, similar biases are overcome with well-designed choice architecture, which considers how the presentation of choices effects the decisions that are ultimately made. Using a metasynthesis research approach, this article describes cognitive biases that can inhibit elegant infrastructure and then presents strategies to mitigate these biases with choice architecture interventions. The emphasis here is on high-impact decisions with cost-effective and plausible choice architecture interventions. This systematic merging of behavioral science and infrastructure systems is meant to provide readers with the background and examples needed to investigate choice architecture as a strategy to influence the infrastructure outcomes they desire.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for their ongoing research partnership with Elke Weber, Eric Johnson, Edy Moulton-Tetlock, and Ruth Greenspan Bell. Their insight and selfless collaboration shaped the research described in this paper. This material is based in part on work supported by The National Science Foundation, through Grants 1054122 and 1531041. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 23 • Issue 1 • March 2017
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© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 8, 2015
Accepted: Feb 16, 2016
Published online: Apr 20, 2016
Discussion open until: Sep 20, 2016
Published in print: Mar 1, 2017
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