Behavioral Biases in Choice & Information

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Abstractions that explain systematic gaps between rational prediction and observed behavior, covering risk and time-preference anomalies (ambiguity aversion, certainty effect, present bias), information-seeking or avoidance puzzles (information avoidance, privacy paradox, Mooers's law), and collective-action problems like the paradox of voting.

9 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Ambiguity Aversion — The regularity that people prefer options with known probabilities over those with unknown ones even at equal expected value — a Savage-violating tilt toward the precise that the single-prior model can't represent, repaired by scoring acts against a set of priors.
• Certainty Effect — Capture the way people overweight an outcome made fully certain relative to one merely probable of equal expected value, so the move from 0.99 to 1.0 commands a disproportionate premium the arithmetic does not justify.
• Common-Pool Resource — The taxonomy cell for a good that is rival yet non-excludable — a conjunction that opens an appropriability gap between private and social cost, switching on the overuse dynamic and posing a three-way governance choice: privatize, regulate, or self-govern.
• Information Avoidance — Actively decline information that is freely available because the anticipated content carries disutility — affective pain, identity threat, or an unwanted obligation — so the resulting non-knowledge is a chosen decision, not an absence.
• Membership Inference Attack — Determine whether a specific record was in a model's training set by reading the systematic behavioural gap — lower loss, higher confidence — between the samples it saw and statistically matched samples it did not.
• Mooers's law — The retrieval-system regularity that a system tends not to be used whenever having the information is more troublesome than not having it — adoption governed by the per-query cost-benefit ratio against a substitute, not the content's absolute value.
• Paradox of Voting (Downs Paradox) — Locate the puzzle that turnout far exceeds what instrumental rationality predicts by pinning the decisiveness term near zero in the pB − C calculus, so the entire observed turnout must be carried by non-instrumental terms outside it.
• Present bias — Present bias is the disproportionate preference for immediate payoff when a choice becomes imminent, producing time-inconsistent reversals relative to preferences expressed for the same delay at an earlier date.
• Privacy Paradox — Explain the stable gap between people's high stated concern for privacy and their routine sharing of personal data for trivial benefits as a decoupling of attitude from choice behavior, produced by present bias, decision fatigue, opacity, and friction asymmetry.