Abstract
Scholars have long argued for the central role of agency—the size of one’s choice set—in the human experience. We demonstrate the importance of agency in shaping people’s preferences. We first examine the effects of resource scarcity—which has been associated with both impatience and a lack of agency—on patience and risk tolerance, successfully replicating the decrease in patience among those exposed to scarcity. Critically, however, we show that endowing individuals with agency over scarcity fully moderates this effect, increasing patience substantially. We further demonstrate that agency’s impact on patience is partly driven by greater risk tolerance. These results hold even though nearly all individuals with greater agency do not exercise it, suggesting that merely knowing that one could alleviate scarcity is sufficient to change behavior. We then demonstrate that the effects of agency generalize to other adverse states, highlighting the potential for agency-based policy and institutional design.
Highlights
Scholars have long argued for the central role of agency—the size of one’s choice set—in the human experience
Our findings suggest that agency may, play a key role in the previously documented relationship between adverse states and impatience: increasing perceived agency among those facing adverse states seems to mitigate the behavioral effects of experiencing the state
In this paper, we show that personal agency over one’s environment has a significant impact on preferences
Summary
Our analyses show that endowing participants with agency over scarcity made their choices indistinguishable from those who did not face scarcity at all: participants in the Agency and Control conditions allocated essentially the same number of tokens to the earlier dates (MControl = 19.2; OLS regression with robust SE clustered at the participant ID level with Control as the omitted group, p = 0.924). Substantially less patient than those in the Control condition (OLS regression with robust SE clustered at the participant ID level with Control as the omitted group, p = 0.031) (see Table 1) These results support our proposition that perceived agency moderates the effect of scarcity on patience. The design and results for this study are described in
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