Preference

slug: preference

one_liner: Agent's ordering over a choice set on some evaluative dimension.

alternate_origin_domains: psychology philosophy political_science

review_flags: ACCEPTED as a prime from project-06 (Kurt, 2026-05-29). Promoted from candidate; review_flag history below.

review_flags: CANDIDATE from project-06 (R16 follow-up). NOVEL gap surfaced by ChatGPT Pro's independent one-shot pass — not on Claude's prior gap list. Worth careful Kurt review.

review_flags: ChatGPT's motivation: "Risk, utility, discounting, indifference, and loss-aversion nodes repeatedly need a base notion of ordered valuation; `preference_heterogeneity_and_conflict` is a CONFLICT variant, not the underlying prime."

review_flags: Would parent: expected_utility, marginal_utility, indifference_curves, time_preference_discounting_future, temporal_inconsistency_and_preference_reversals, risk_aversion, loss_aversion, preference_heterogeneity_ and_conflict (which becomes a CHILD rather than the umbrella).

review_flags: Distinct from `decision` (preference can exist without action commitment), `value_commensuration` (preferences need not be expressed in a common metric), `optimization` (optimization searches for a best feasible option under an objective; preference is the ordering that supplies the objective).

review_flags: substrate_independence scores are PROPOSER estimates, pending triangulation.

review_flags: 2026-05-28 schema reformat: original project-06 v1 used the 5-section template (Core Idea / Broad Use / Structural Signature / Distinction from Neighbors / Notes); reformatted to the canonical 8-section runbook v1 schema. Structural Signature content folded into Manages Complexity + Abstract Reasoning; project-06 load-bearing rationale preserved in Notes.

core_idea:
Preference is an agent's ordering over a choice set on some evaluative dimension — a disposition that, when consulted, says which alternatives are favored, disfavored, indifferent, or incomparable, the framing Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995) take as the canonical primitive of modern microeconomic theory. <!-- FACT-D56-226 -->[^mas-colell-whinston-green-1995] The four roles travel together everywhere the prime is invoked: a **choice set** (the alternatives being ordered), an **evaluator** (the agent, criterion, system, or model whose preference this is), an **ordering relation** over the set (which may be complete or partial, transitive or inconsistent, strict or weak), and a **context** in which the ordering does work — guiding selection, predicting behavior, or supplying the objective that optimization will then maximize, the decomposition Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995) develop in their chapter contrasting the preference-based and choice-based approaches. <!-- FACT-D56-227 -->[^mas-colell-whinston-green-1995]

The abstraction is substrate-neutral. Utility functions, rankings, revealed choices, policy priorities, qualitative value orderings, and learned reward signals are all *implementations* of the same ordering relation; the relation is the prime, the implementation is local technology — a substrate range that runs from Debreu's (1954) representation theorem for continuous preference orderings to Christiano et al.'s (2017) deep-RL reward models fit from pairwise human comparisons. <!-- FACT-D56-228 -->[^debreu-1954][^christiano-et-al-2017] What preference does not include is also load-bearing for the prime. It is not the *act of selecting* (that belongs to `decision`); it is not the *condition that comparisons share a common metric* (`value_commensuration`); it is not the *search for a best feasible option under an objective* (`optimization`, which presupposes preference); it is not the *case of multiple evaluators disagreeing* (`preference_heterogeneity_and_conflict`, a child case). The prime names the bare commitment of comparability under an ordering from an evaluator's standpoint — nothing more, but nothing less either, as Sen (1970) insists in separating the ordering relation from the choice procedure and from interpersonal aggregation. <!-- FACT-D56-229 -->[^sen-1970]

structural_signature:
Preference encodes a structural pattern: **choice set → evaluator's disposition → ordering relation → contextual consumption**. It separates two regimes (an undifferentiated set of alternatives and a set carrying an evaluator-relative ordering) and names the relation between them. The relation is the minimum addition needed to turn "here are some options" into "here are some options under an ordering," the minimalist axiomatic core Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995) develop before any utility representation is introduced. <!-- FACT-D56-230 -->[^mas-colell-whinston-green-1995]

**Recurring features:**

- Ordering relation over a choice set from an evaluator's standpoint
- Disposition that picks out favored alternatives when consulted
- Comparative valuation independent of action commitment
- Substrate-neutral ranking, revealed or stated, complete or partial
- Objective supplied to downstream selection or optimization
- Evaluator-relative rather than view-from-nowhere

The signature applies whether the evaluator is a consumer ranking grocery bundles, a voter ordering candidates, a critic ranking performances (the taste-and-distinction apparatus Bourdieu (1984) analyzes for cultural judgment), a foraging bee preferring flower types, an RLHF labeler picking better completions (the setup Christiano et al. (2017) formalized for deep reinforcement learning), or a recommender system inferring an ordering from clickstream traces. What varies is which slot fills with what; what is conserved is the four-role relation. <!-- FACT-D56-231 -->[^bourdieu-1984][^christiano-et-al-2017]

what_it_is_not:
Preference is **not** the same as choice. A choice is a discrete act of selecting one option from a set at a moment in time; a preference is the standing ordering that may inform many choices, no choices, or choices that contradict the ordering (under akrasia, constraint, or noise). I can prefer X to Y for years without ever selecting between them; I can choose Y over X once and still prefer X. Conflating preference with choice is the standard error of behaviorist-leaning theories, which assume the act exhaustively reveals the disposition. It does not — choice is a *sample* from a preference disposition mixed with constraint, noise, framing, and strategic considerations.

Preference is also not utility. Utility is *one particular quantification* of a preference ordering — a real-valued function that represents the ordering when certain axioms hold (completeness, transitivity, continuity, independence, in the classical von Neumann-Morgenstern framing). Many preferences cannot be represented as utility functions (intransitive, incomplete, or lexicographic orderings resist real-valued representation), and many ordering-equivalent utility functions encode the same preference (monotone transformations preserve the ordering). The prime is the ordering; utility is one mathematically convenient representation that imports stronger assumptions than the ordering itself requires.

Preference is not a value either, in the broader normative sense. A value is a standing commitment to what *should* matter (justice, beauty, autonomy, efficiency); a preference is an ordering over alternatives that may or may not reflect values, that may include strictly hedonic or purely habitual orderings with no normative content, and that may exist in tension with declared values. A person can value health while preferring a cheeseburger; the value sets standards, the preference orders alternatives.

Preference is not a bias. A bias is a *systematic deviation from a posited rational benchmark*, typically defined relative to a normative theory of preference (expected utility, Bayesian updating). The benchmark itself is preference-theoretic; biases are diagnosed against that benchmark. Calling a preference "biased" presupposes a normative ordering against which the empirical ordering deviates — so bias is not an alternative to preference but a diagnostic mode within preference theory.

Finally, preference is not optimization. Optimization searches for the best feasible option under an objective; preference *is* the ordering that supplies that objective. Optimization presupposes preference; preference is the more primitive notion. A system can have preferences without optimizing (it may simply consult the ordering when asked, never running a search), and an optimizer is empty without a preference relation specifying what counts as better — the asymmetry Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995) build into the order of presentation, defining preferences before any utility-maximization problem is posed. <!-- FACT-D56-232 -->[^mas-colell-whinston-green-1995]

broad_use:
**Economics & decision theory:** Utility functions, ordinal and cardinal preference orderings, indifference curves, revealed preference theory, expected utility under risk, subjective expected utility under uncertainty, time preference and intertemporal discounting. Preference is the foundational primitive on top of which the entire formal apparatus of consumer theory, choice theory, and welfare economics is built — from von Neumann and Morgenstern's (1944) expected-utility axiomatization to Samuelson's (1938) revealed-preference reconstruction of consumer demand without recourse to utility. <!-- FACT-D56-233 -->[^von-neumann-morgenstern-1944][^samuelson-1938]

**Behavioral & cognitive psychology:** Choice under risk and uncertainty (prospect theory, loss aversion, reference-dependence), framing effects, preference reversals, time-inconsistent preferences (hyperbolic discounting), endowment effects, status-quo bias. Each of these is a documented deviation between empirical orderings and the rational-choice benchmark, and each presupposes the prime structurally even while challenging its axiomatic forms.

**Political theory & public choice:** Voter preference orderings, Arrow's impossibility theorem on aggregating heterogeneous preferences into a social preference, Condorcet cycles, Sen's liberal paradox, social welfare functions, mechanism design that elicits or aggregates individual orderings into collective outcomes. The aggregation problem is non-trivial precisely because preference is evaluator-relative — there is no view-from-nowhere ordering.

**Machine learning:** Preference learning from pairwise comparisons (RLHF, DPO, ranking losses), reward modeling, contextual bandits, recommender systems learning user orderings from implicit signals (clicks, dwell time, skips), inverse reinforcement learning recovering reward functions from observed behavior. The "evaluator" is a learned scoring function rather than a conscious agent, but the four-role structure is intact.

**Biology & behavioral ecology:** Revealed preference in animal foraging (patch selection, prey choice), mate choice, habitat selection, optimal foraging theory's apparatus borrowed directly from microeconomics. The substrate-furthest case for the prime: a pollinator's revealed flower preference has no stated valuation, no introspective access, no utility function written down, and yet the ordering-from-an-evaluator's-standpoint pattern fits cleanly.

**Aesthetics & criticism:** Ranked judgments over artworks, performances, or styles from a critic's or an audience's standpoint; the formal apparatus of taste sociology (Bourdieu); preference orderings as cultural-capital signals. The ordering is evaluator-relative even when dressed in universalist rhetoric.

clarity:
A core function of "preference" is to **separate the ordering from everything around the ordering**. Many problems present as confusions about valuation that are really confusions about which slot is doing the work. "Why did she pick that one?" is a question about choice (the act); "Why does she rank that one above the other?" is a question about preference (the ordering); "Why is that one worth more?" is a question about value or utility (the magnitude or commitment); "Which is the best one available?" is a question about optimization (the search under the ordering). When the four are conflated, debates ricochet between domains without progress.

Naming the prime as the ordering relation, evaluator-relative, distinct from action and from quantification, lets the analyst locate the live question. Is the choice set ill-defined? Then we're upstream of preference — we need a clearer set of alternatives. Is the evaluator ambiguous? Then we have an attribution problem — *whose* preference is at stake? Is the ordering partial, intransitive, or framing-dependent? Then the disposition itself is structured differently than a single complete transitive ordering can capture, and the formal apparatus must be weakened or restructured. Is the context shifting between consultation and use? Then we have a stability problem — the same ordering may not be available when needed, the family of distinctions Sen (1970) systematizes when separating ordering, consistency, and aggregation as conceptually independent axes. <!-- FACT-D56-234 -->[^sen-1970]

The prime also clarifies why deviations are diagnostic rather than disqualifying. An intransitive cycle in revealed preference is not "wrong" — it is *information* about how the underlying disposition is structured (reference-dependent, multidimensional, mood-modulated). Treating deviations as data rather than as errors-to-be-corrected requires having the prime named so that "deviation from what?" has a precise referent.

manages_complexity:
Preference decomposes a valuation situation into four named roles that turn an opaque "what's better here?" into a structured problem. Once the choice set, evaluator, ordering, and context are visible, downstream phenomena fall out by topology rather than by reinvention in each domain.

Multiple evaluators with different orderings becomes *preference heterogeneity* — a structural sub-case where the evaluator slot is plural and orderings disagree. An ordering that flips with framing or with time becomes *temporal inconsistency* or *preference reversal* — the structural sub-case Strotz (1955) formalized as time-inconsistent dynamic utility maximization — where the ordering itself is unstable across consultation contexts. An ordering inferred from behavior rather than from reports becomes *revealed preference* — the Samuelson (1938) sub-case where the access mode to the ordering is indirect. An ordering aggregated across many evaluators raises the *social-choice* problem and Arrow's (1951) impossibility theorem — a structural sub-case where the aggregation operation itself faces constraints. <!-- FACT-D56-235 -->[^strotz-1955][^samuelson-1938][^arrow-1951]

The same role-vocabulary that handles a consumer choosing between bundles handles a voter ranking candidates, an RLHF labeler comparing model outputs, and a foraging animal choosing patches. The analyst can locate the live question — is the choice set ill-defined? Is the evaluator ambiguous? Is the ordering partial or intransitive? Is the context shifting? — rather than re-deriving the structure for each domain.

In organizations and policy, this reframes preference-elicitation problems. Stakeholder consultations often collect raw rankings without specifying the choice set ("rank these priorities" — which priorities? compared to what omitted alternatives?), without disambiguating the evaluator ("the community ranks" — which community, aggregated how?), without checking ordering stability across framings, and without naming the context of consumption. The four-role decomposition makes each of these explicit and surfaces design choices that would otherwise be made implicitly.

abstract_reasoning:
Preference supports a family of substrate-neutral operations once the ordering is named. The analyst can take *transitive closure* — if X ≻ Y and Y ≻ Z, infer X ≻ Z under suitable conditions — to extend a partial ordering and reason about pairs the evaluator has not directly compared. They can check **consistency** (transitivity, completeness, independence of irrelevant alternatives) and use violations as diagnostic evidence that the underlying disposition is structured differently than assumed (reference-dependent, multidimensional, intransitive cycles). They can perform **aggregation** across multiple evaluators (voting rules, social welfare functions, Borda counts, Kemeny medians) and confront the impossibility results that come with it.

They can run **counterfactuals**: if the choice set were enlarged, would the favored option remain favored (independence of irrelevant alternatives, menu effects)? If the framing were inverted, would the ordering reverse (reference-point sensitivity)? If the evaluator were replaced by a similar evaluator, would the ordering survive (interpersonal stability)? Each counterfactual is a probe into a different structural property of the prime.

These operations let preference *supply the objective* that downstream procedures — optimization, decision, choice under constraint — consume. Subordinate primes inherit the operations and add curvature or asymmetry on top: `time_preference` specifies the shape of an evaluator's ordering across temporally separated outcomes (the curvature family Frederick, Loewenstein, and O'Donoghue (2002) survey across exponential and hyperbolic discounting); `risk_aversion` specifies the shape across probabilistically distributed outcomes; `loss_aversion` specifies an asymmetric ordering around a reference point that treats losses and gains differently (the reference-dependent shape Kahneman and Tversky (1979) introduced in prospect theory). Each presupposes the bare preference relation and adds structured deviations from the linear-in-magnitudes baseline. <!-- FACT-D56-236 -->[^frederick-loewenstein-odonoghue-2002][^kahneman-tversky-1979]

The reasoning also goes upward. From preference, the analyst can derive *expected utility* under risk by combining the ordering with a probability measure; can derive *indifference curves* by tracing iso-preference contours through the choice space; can derive *marginal utility* by examining how the ordering changes as a single dimension varies. These derived objects are not new primes but *projections* of the underlying preference relation under added structure.

knowledge_transfer:
The vocabulary travels intact across substrates. An economist studying utility functions, a behavioral psychologist studying prospect theory, a political theorist working on Arrow's impossibility, an ML researcher training a reward model from pairwise comparisons, and an ecologist documenting revealed foraging preference in pollinators are all working with the same four-role structure: choice set, evaluator, ordering, context. The transfer is structural, not metaphorical.

The animal case is especially load-bearing for substrate independence. A bumblebee's revealed preference between flower types has no utility function written down anywhere, no stated valuation, no language at all, and yet the ordering-from-an-evaluator's-standpoint pattern fits cleanly. That rules out the suspicion that preference is a specialty of economics or human cognition; it is a structural relation that any system capable of differential selection can instantiate.

Reward modeling in ML pulls the same trick from the other direction. The "evaluator" is a learned scoring function rather than an agent with introspective access; the choice set is a pool of candidate outputs (model completions, ranked items, action sequences); the ordering is fit from pairwise comparison data (the recipe Christiano et al. (2017) introduced for deep reinforcement learning from human preferences); the context is the downstream policy or recommender that will consume the ordering. The structural roles are all present. The substrate-furthest case is implicit revealed-preference learning from clickstream: the "evaluator" is a population of users whose orderings are *inferred* by the system from behavioral traces (clicks, dwell time, skips, returns) with no introspective access to the orderings themselves. The system never asks "what do you prefer?" — it watches behavior, models the ordering that would best explain it, and consults that model for ranking decisions. This is the prime running entirely outside human reflective practice. <!-- FACT-D56-237 -->[^christiano-et-al-2017]

Practitioners moving between domains gain real leverage from carrying the prime's vocabulary intact. A behavioral economist recognizes Arrow's impossibility in mechanism-design problems they encounter in ML preference aggregation. An ML researcher recognizes intransitive cycles in their pairwise labeling data as a known structural phenomenon, not as label noise to be cleaned away. A political theorist working on participatory budgeting can borrow elicitation techniques developed for consumer choice. The transfer is not a metaphor that breaks under pressure; it is the same relation showing up in different implementations.

formal_abstract:
**Consumer theory (microeconomics):** Consider the canonical setup as developed in Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995). The **choice set** is a budget-constrained subset of a commodity space (bundles of goods at given prices and income); the **evaluator** is a consumer with a preference relation ≻; the **ordering relation** is assumed complete and transitive over the commodity space; the **context** is a budget-allocation problem the consumer is presumed to solve by selecting the most-preferred bundle in the budget set. From this minimal setup, an entire formal apparatus follows: indifference curves are iso-preference contours; marginal rates of substitution are local slopes of those contours; demand curves are projections of optimal choices as prices vary; consumer surplus is a welfare measure derived from the ordering plus a willingness-to-pay quantification. **Mapped back:** The four-role structure is fully exposed. Notice what is *not* in the setup: no utility function (one can be constructed under continuity assumptions following Debreu (1954), but the ordering is primary), no act of choosing (the formalism describes the structure of preference, not the dynamics of decision), no claim that the ordering is correct or rational (only that it satisfies the stated axioms). Stripping all of that out leaves the prime: an ordering, evaluator-relative, defined over a choice set, consumed by a context. <!-- FACT-D56-238 -->[^mas-colell-whinston-green-1995][^debreu-1954]

**RLHF preference learning (ML):** Consider an RLHF training run, of the kind Christiano et al. (2017) introduced and Ouyang et al. (2022) scaled up in InstructGPT, that consumes a labeler's pairwise comparisons over model completions. The **choice set** is the pool of generated completions on a given prompt; the **evaluator** is the human labeler (or a population of labelers, aggregated); the **ordering relation** is the labeler's revealed pairwise judgments ("completion A is better than completion B"); the **context** is the training pipeline that will use the ordering to fit a reward model and shape policy. The four roles are immediately legible. The ordering is partial (the labeler did not compare every pair), possibly inconsistent across labelers (heterogeneity), possibly intransitive within a single labeler under fatigue or framing, and the trained reward model is an *attempt to extrapolate* the labeler's preference disposition to unseen pairs. **Mapped back:** The same four-role pattern fits a consumer choosing between grocery bundles, a voter ranking candidates, and a foraging bee picking flowers — what changes is which slot fills with what, not the structure of the relation itself. The ML case also makes the *inference* visible: the reward model is a learned approximation of the underlying preference relation, and the quality of the approximation depends on how the ordering itself is structured (transitivity helps; intransitive cycles do not). <!-- FACT-D56-239 -->[^christiano-et-al-2017][^ouyang-et-al-2022]

applied_industry:
**Recommender systems learning from clickstream:** A streaming service builds a recommender from implicit user signals. The **choice set** is the catalog of available items (films, songs, articles); the **evaluator** is each user (or a learned representation of each user); the **ordering relation** is inferred from behavioral traces — clicks, completion rate, dwell time, returns, skips — and represented as a learned scoring function that ranks items per user; the **context** is the front-end that surfaces ranked recommendations and the feedback loop that updates the model from continued interaction. No user is ever asked "what do you prefer?" The system constructs the ordering by Bayesian inference over the trace, treating behavior as a noisy sample from a stable underlying preference relation it never sees directly. **Mapped back:** This is the prime at its substrate-furthest case: no introspective access, no stated valuation, no language, no agent with conscious deliberation about the ordering — just behavior, inference, and a learned ordering consumed by ranking. The fact that the four-role structure still applies cleanly is the strong-form evidence that preference is a substrate-independent relation, not a feature of conscious deliberation. The same case also surfaces well-known structural pathologies: feedback loops where the system's recommendations shape the trace that the system then re-infers from, producing apparent preference shifts that are actually artifacts of the inference loop. Naming the prime separates these artifacts from genuine preference change.

**Participatory budgeting (public policy):** A city allocates a fraction of its capital budget through a participatory process. The **choice set** is a slate of capital projects (parks, transit improvements, library renovations); the **evaluators** are residents of the affected districts; the **ordering relation** is elicited via approval voting, ranked-choice voting, or quadratic voting depending on the design; the **context** is a budget allocation procedure that aggregates individual orderings into a collective decision under budget constraint. The structural design choices are visible at every step: how is the choice set selected (and by whom, screening out which alternatives)? How is the evaluator set defined (residents only? Property owners? Visitors? Weighted by stake?)? Which aggregation rule is used (and what impossibility results, in the line opened by Arrow (1951), does it skirt or accept)? How is the elicited ordering interpreted in the budget-allocation context, given that the elicitation framing itself can reverse the ordering as Tversky and Kahneman (1981) demonstrated for choices over public outcomes (lexicographic? Threshold? Welfare-weighted?)? **Mapped back:** Participatory budgeting is *preference elicitation and aggregation* made deliberately visible as a political process. The same four-role decomposition that handles a consumer at a checkout handles a city of a million making collective capital decisions; only the mechanism design at each slot is more elaborate. The structural unity is the point: the same prime supports both micro-level consumer theory and macro-level democratic mechanism design, and the design choices that look like political philosophy reduce, structurally, to choices about how to populate each slot of the four-role relation. <!-- FACT-D56-240 -->[^arrow-1951][^tversky-kahneman-1981]

title: The ordering and the act diverge under constraint, noise, or akrasia

body: Preference is the standing ordering; choice is an act sampled from it under constraints, distractions, framing, and momentary state. A reveal-preference researcher treats the act as the canonical data on the ordering — yet the act is always preference-plus-noise-plus-constraint, and disentangling the components requires modeling assumptions that go beyond the prime itself. Treating choice as transparent to preference (the strong behaviorist move) is theoretically convenient and empirically false; treating choice as opaque to preference (the strong cognitivist move) gives up the only external access channel. The working compromise is always a structured inference under stated assumptions, and the assumptions do real work.

title: Preference and value pull apart, especially under reflective scrutiny

body: An evaluator can prefer X to Y without endorsing the preference on reflection (the cheeseburger-vs-salad case, the addiction case, the impulse-purchase case), and can value Y over X while continuing to prefer X. Some traditions resolve the tension by privileging reflective endorsement (Frankfurt's higher-order desires, idealized-preference theories), others by privileging revealed orderings (behavioral welfare economics). The tension cannot be resolved at the level of the prime — preference names the ordering, and the ordering can disagree with what the evaluator says they value or what they would value under idealized conditions. Building any normative apparatus on top of preference requires deciding how to handle this gap.

title: Aggregation across evaluators faces structural impossibility results

body: Arrow's theorem shows that no aggregation rule can satisfy a modest set of fairness conditions (unrestricted domain, Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, non-dictatorship) once we have three or more alternatives and two or more evaluators. Sen's liberal paradox and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem extend the impossibility. The tension is structural rather than technical: any move to aggregate preference orderings into a collective ordering must sacrifice at least one intuitively desirable property. There is no neutral aggregation. This shapes how social choice, welfare economics, and mechanism design must proceed — by stating which properties they preserve and which they sacrifice, never by hoping for a clean aggregation.

title: Stated and revealed preference systematically disagree, and neither is canonical

body: Stated preferences (what an evaluator says they prefer) and revealed preferences (what their behavior implies) often diverge — and not just because of measurement noise. Stated preferences are filtered through self-presentation, social desirability, and incomplete introspective access; revealed preferences are filtered through constraint, framing, habit, and choice-architecture. Each captures something the other misses. Privileging either as "the real preference" embeds a methodological commitment that the prime itself does not authorize. Practitioners must decide case-by-case which access mode to trust for which question, and the decision is rarely neutral.

title: The choice set is rarely given; it is constructed, and the construction shapes the ordering

body: Preference is defined over a choice set, but in practice the set is selected — by a designer, by attention, by what is presented as alternatives. Menu effects (the presence of irrelevant alternatives changes the ordering over relevant ones), decoy effects (a dominated alternative shifts the ordering toward a target), and choice-architecture effects all show that the choice set is not innocent. The prime treats the set as given; the empirical reality is that whoever populates the set has substantial influence over what the consulted ordering looks like. This is not a defect of the prime — the prime is correctly modular at this seam — but it means that any preference-elicitation exercise is also, unavoidably, a choice-set construction exercise, and the two cannot be neatly separated in practice.

prose:
1. **Four-role decomposition for elicitation:** When facing a confusing preference-attribution problem, explicitly populate each slot: name the choice set (and the alternatives omitted), specify the evaluator (and the aggregation rule if plural), characterize the ordering (complete or partial, transitive or not, strict or weak), and identify the consumption context (what downstream procedure will use the ordering). Each unnamed slot is a place where confusion has been smuggled in.

2. **Access-mode triangulation:** When stated and revealed preferences disagree, treat the disagreement as data about the underlying disposition rather than as measurement error to be resolved. Build models that explicitly handle the two access modes as differently distorted views on the same ordering, and use the disagreement pattern to diagnose which distortions are operative (hypothetical bias in stated, constraint or framing effects in revealed).

3. **Axiom-relaxation diagnosis:** When empirical orderings violate the standard axioms (transitivity, completeness, independence), diagnose which axiom is failing and treat the failure as structural information. Intransitive cycles point to multidimensional or reference-dependent orderings; incompleteness points to genuine incomparability rather than indifference; independence violations point to reference-effects or framing-effects. Each failure pattern suggests a different weakening of the formal apparatus.

4. **Aggregation-rule selection under impossibility:** When aggregating heterogeneous preferences, accept that Arrow's impossibility forecloses any neutral rule and instead select an aggregation procedure by explicit normative commitment — which properties to preserve (Pareto, anonymity, neutrality, monotonicity), which to sacrifice (independence of irrelevant alternatives, non-dictatorship under certain restrictions). The choice is political-philosophical, not technical.

5. **Choice-set design as preference engineering:** Recognize that the choice set is rarely given and that whoever populates it (a designer, a survey instrument, a menu) is doing preference work upstream of the ordering itself. Design choice sets deliberately rather than defaulting to convenience samples or status-quo presentations; document the construction so that downstream inferences can be checked against the construction's choices.

6. **Substrate-furthest sanity-check:** When applying preference language to non-human or non-conscious substrates (ML systems, ecological agents, control loops), populate the four roles explicitly and check that each slot is non-trivially filled. If the "evaluator" slot reduces to "any system with differential response," the application is too thin to do work. If the four roles fill cleanly with structurally non-trivial content (as in clickstream-driven recommenders or revealed pollinator preference), the prime is doing real work and the substrate distance is informative rather than disqualifying.

notes:
ChatGPT Pro's R16 pass surfaced this as a clear gap, observing that the catalog already had a CONFLICT-flavored node (`preference_heterogeneity_and_conflict`) but not the underlying ordering prime. The case proved strong on review: the risk/utility/discounting/loss-aversion cluster of behavioral economics and decision theory was genuinely orphaned, and "preference" is the canonical vocabulary across all those fields. The candidate children re-home cleanly under the accepted prime; `preference_heterogeneity_and_conflict` becomes a sub-case (preferences differing across evaluators) rather than the umbrella.

The R17a/b/c wiring decisions are worth recording explicitly. The three "shape" children — `time_preference`, `risk_aversion`, `loss_aversion` — are all subsumption-type children of preference: each *is* a preference relation with added structure (intertemporal curvature, probability-weighting curvature, reference-point asymmetry). R17a confirmed subsumption for all three on the first pass; R17c re-confirmed loss_aversion as subsumption; R17b retyped risk_aversion to composition/presupposes after closer review of cases where risk preferences combine probability and utility components that can be modeled separately. The "derived object" children — `expected_utility`, `marginal_utility`, `indifference_curves`, `preference_heterogeneity` — are presupposes-type rather than subsumption-type: each *uses* a preference relation as input and adds structure on top (a probability measure, a differentiation operation, an iso-preference contour map, a multi-evaluator aggregation). The distinction between subsumption (the child is a structured instance of the parent) and presupposes (the child requires the parent as a component) is the load-bearing typology for the project-06b hierarchy work.

The clickstream-driven recommender case is worth flagging as the substrate-furthest concrete example currently catalogued. Unlike RLHF (where a human labeler is explicitly providing pairwise judgments), implicit revealed-preference learning operates entirely outside human reflective practice: no agent ever consults their ordering and reports it, no labeler ever provides a comparison, the system simply infers the ordering from behavioral traces. This is the substrate-distance regime where the prime is doing the most work — defending the structural unity of preference against the temptation to confine it to conscious deliberation. If the four-role decomposition still applies cleanly here (and it does), the substrate-independence claim is solid.

Open question worth carrying forward: the relationship to a possible `value` prime, if one is added to the catalog. Preference might decompose to `ordering`-over-`value`, but the simpler near-root positioning is probably right for v1 — preference is a structural relation that does not require an articulated value space to be operative, and the bumblebee/clickstream cases would be hard to handle under a value-decomposed positioning.

Preference is sometimes confused with `optimization`. The relation is asymmetric: optimization *presupposes* preference (it needs an objective, supplied by an ordering), but preference does not presuppose optimization (an ordering can exist and be consulted without any search-for-best occurring). The asymmetry is load-bearing for the catalog hierarchy: optimization is downstream of preference, not parallel to it.


Preference Falsification

type: prime

one_liner: Under asymmetric cost on expression, agents voice a cheaper preference than the one they privately hold, so the visible distribution diverges from the held one.

status: draft

core_idea:
Preference falsification is the structural pattern in which an agent's publicly stated preference systematically diverges from their privately held preference under asymmetric cost on expression. The agent holds an actual ordering over states of the world (or a belief, opinion, or judgement) and faces a cost structure in which publicly voicing that ordering imposes social, political, professional, or material penalties that voicing a different, typically conformist, ordering does not. Under that cost asymmetry, the agent voices the cheaper preference while continuing to hold the costlier one privately. The structural fact is the *gap* between the held distribution and the visible distribution, sustained by the cost asymmetry.

Three commitments fix the pattern. First, an *internal preference* (or belief or judgement) that the agent has with some stability — it is not the act of public expression that constitutes the preference. Second, an *expression cost asymmetry* — voicing the private preference is more costly than voicing some alternative (silence, an opposing opinion, the orthodox line), where the cost can be reputational, professional, social, political, or material. Third, an *expressed preference* that differs systematically from the held one in the direction the cost asymmetry favours. The pattern is not ordinary lying, persuasion, or opinion change: the agent is not deceived and has not changed their mind, but faces a private problem of strategic expression and resolves it in favour of the cheaper public stance. The aggregate consequences are non-trivial: when many agents falsify in the same direction, the observed distribution diverges systematically from the held distribution, and that observed distribution becomes the input other agents use to estimate the held distribution — a self-referential loop in which misperception cascades downward, deepening falsification, until the resulting large gap becomes structurally fragile and a small change in the cost structure can trigger a sudden preference cascade.

structural_signature:
*the privately held preference* — *the expression-cost asymmetry across voicings* — *the strategically expressed preference* — *the held-versus-expressed gap* — *the perception loop reading the visible distribution* — *the cost-structure-shock cascade fragility*

A setting exhibits preference falsification when each of the following holds:

- **A privately held preference.** Each agent has a stable internal ordering, belief, or judgement that exists independently of any act of public expression — the agent is not deceived and has not changed their mind.
- **An expression-cost asymmetry.** Voicing the held preference carries higher cost — reputational, professional, social, political, or material — than voicing some alternative (silence, the orthodox line, the conformist position).
- **A strategically expressed preference.** Under that asymmetry the agent voices the cheaper preference while continuing to hold the costlier one, resolving a private problem of expression rather than lying or being persuaded.
- **A held-versus-expressed gap.** Across many co-directional falsifiers, the visible distribution diverges systematically from the held distribution in the direction the cost asymmetry favours. This gap is the load-bearing structural object.
- **A perception loop.** The visible distribution is the only estimator other agents have of the held distribution, and each agent's expression decision depends on that estimate — a self-referential loop in which misperception cascades and deepens the falsification.
- **A cascade-fragility invariant.** A large sustained gap is structurally fragile: a small change in the cost structure (a visible defection, a permission signal) can trigger a sudden preference cascade in which the held distribution surfaces rapidly while itself remaining unchanged.

The pattern is distinct from conformity (the held preference is preserved, not adopted), from information cascades (no cost asymmetry), and from costly signalling (it hides rather than conveys private information). Its variables — held distribution, cost structure, observed distribution, perception loop, cost-shock — make sudden public reorientations predictable and yield a channel-targeted intervention set (anonymity, aggregated revelation, pioneer dissent, cost-structure auditing).

what_it_is_not:
- **Not `conformity`.** Conformity is *adoption* of the group view — the agent comes to actually hold the majority preference. Falsification *preserves* the held preference while distorting only the visible one; remove the expression cost and a different view surfaces.
- **Not an `information_cascade`.** An information cascade is sequential rational copying of others' visible actions under inference about their private signals, with no cost-asymmetry component. Falsification is driven by *expression cost*, not by Bayesian updating on others' choices.
- **Not `signaling`.** Costly signalling *conveys* private information through costly action; falsification is its inverse — it *hides* private information by avoiding the costly act of voicing the held view.
- **Not `preference_heterogeneity_and_conflict`.** That names genuinely differing held preferences in tension. Falsification can occur even under near-universal *agreement* in held preference, hidden behind uniform public conformity.
- **Not `spiral_of_silence` as a static state.** The spiral of silence (and pluralistic ignorance) is the cognitive climate falsification produces; this prime is the *expressive process* under cost asymmetry that produces and sustains it.
- **Common misclassification.** Reading sudden public reorientation as mass opinion change ("they were persuaded"). The held distribution may never have moved — only expression became safe; the diagnostic question is "what made expression safe?", not "what changed their minds?"

broad_use: The held-versus-expressed gap under expression-cost asymmetry recurs across human-social and political substrates. In **authoritarian and totalitarian polities**, its original substrate, citizens publicly express loyalty while privately holding opposition, and the apparent stability masks a large gap; the 1989 collapses of Eastern European communist regimes were preference cascades in this exact pattern, the falsifying majority surfacing in days once defection became visible.<!-- FACT-D69-101 -->[^kuran-1995] In **public opinion in democracies**, spiral-of-silence dynamics and pre-election polling surprises (the shy-voter effects) reflect falsification under perceived social-desirability cost.<!-- FACT-D69-102 -->[^noelle-neumann-1984] The pattern recurs in **religious orthodoxy** (private doubt within enforced orthodoxies, released as rapid reorientation when permission arrives), in **workplaces** (silent dissent in meetings where junior staff face reputational cost, revealed in the post-meeting hallway conversation), in **academic orthodoxy** (junior researchers voicing the orthodox line until tenure or a paradigm shift makes the held view safe), in **harassment underreporting** (targets silencing themselves under expected retaliation, with the public cascade a textbook release of long-falsified preferences)<!-- FACT-D69-103 -->[^kuran-1995], in **markets** (analysts shading reports toward the dominant narrative, with "everyone secretly knew it was overvalued" recognition after a crash)<!-- FACT-D69-104 -->[^kuran-1995], in **social-media content** (users self-censoring under platform-norm pressure), in **voting under perceived judgement** (stated intent for socially-disfavoured candidates underrepresenting actual voting), and in **pre-cascade conditions in social movements** (civil-rights, suffrage, and gay-rights movements exhibiting long gaps followed by rapid reorientation).<!-- FACT-D69-105 -->[^kuran-1995] The cross-substrate fit is strong because the mechanism — asymmetric cost on expression — is generic to any system in which agents can voice a preference and face differential cost for different voicings, though all the substrates are human-social.

clarity:
Preference falsification clarifies by separating *held* preference from *expressed* preference and naming the gap between them as a structural object with its own dynamics. Ordinary discourse treats publicly visible opinion as a more-or-less reliable signal of held opinion; the prime makes the cost-driven substitution explicit, so the gap can be reasoned about, measured, and managed rather than assumed away. This converts a hidden assumption — that the visible distribution estimates the held one — into an inspectable claim that holds only when the expression cost asymmetry is small.

The clarifying force extends to a recurring class of explanation errors. When a regime collapses suddenly, when an organisation pivots overnight on a settled policy, or when a market reverses once the contrarian view becomes safe, the conventional explanation reaches for "people changed their minds." The prime points instead to a stable held distribution previously suppressed and now released by a cost-structure change, so the diagnostic question is not "what made them change?" but "what made expression safe?" The prime also distinguishes itself carefully from neighbours. It is distinct from *conformity*, which is adoption of the group view (the agent comes to actually hold the majority preference), whereas falsification preserves the held distribution but distorts the visible one. It is distinct from an *information cascade*, which is sequential rational copying of visible actions under inference about private signals, with no cost-asymmetry component. It is the inverse of *costly signalling*, which conveys private information through costly action, whereas falsification hides it by avoiding costly action. It is the structural divergence that *self-censorship* is one means of producing, and it is the expressive process that produces and sustains the static cognitive state of *pluralistic ignorance*. Holding these apart keeps the prime from being mistaken for genuine opinion change, rational copying, signalling, or a mere cognitive state.

manages_complexity:
The pattern compresses an unmanageable space of "why did the regime collapse, the seminar reverse, the boardroom unanimity turn out to be unanimous skepticism, the bubble pop, the movement break through" into a small set of structural pieces: the held distribution, the expression-cost structure, the observed distribution, the perception-of-distribution feedback, and the cost-structure shock. Once these are named, sudden public reorientations become tractable as predictable consequences of shocks to the cost structure rather than mysterious mass opinion changes. A bewildering variety of historical surprises reduces to one mechanism operating on a few variables.

The compression is operational because the intervention catalogue compresses in the same way. Wherever falsification is suspected, the same intervention family applies, each move targeting a specific variable. Anonymity — secret ballots, anonymous surveys, anonymous suggestion mechanisms, blind peer review — reduces the expression cost asymmetry directly.<!-- FACT-D69-106 -->[^kuran-1995] Aggregated revelation — poll sampling that conceals individual responses, list experiments that elicit sensitive preferences statistically — gives population-level signal without individual-level cost. Pioneer dissent — a small number of visible defectors — lowers the perceived isolation cost for everyone behind them, shifting the cost structure. And cost-structure auditing — asking what would happen to a dissenter before treating a unanimous public position as evidence of a unanimous held position — is the diagnostic move. Because each intervention is recognisable as a move on a named variable (the reputational channel, the professional channel, the perceived climate), the prime turns the open-ended problem of surfacing true opinion into a bounded set of channel-targeted interventions.

abstract_reasoning:
Preference falsification trains a reasoner to interrogate any apparent consensus through the cost structure on expression. The reasoner asks: whose held preference is at issue? What is the cost of voicing the held preference relative to alternatives? Who has the held preference but is voicing the cheaper alternative? And what would the observed distribution look like if the cost asymmetry were removed? Because these questions reference only the abstract roles — held preference, expression cost asymmetry, observed distribution, perception loop — they apply to a polity, a market, an organisation, or a seminar without translation, though the substrates remain human-social.

Several reusable moves follow. The cost-asymmetry diagnostic estimates the cost of voicing each available position; large asymmetries predict large held-versus-expressed gaps, so the reasoner characterises the cost structure before treating the expressed distribution as a measurement of the held one. The cascade-fragility prediction treats settings with large gaps as structurally unstable, so the reasoner reads apparent stability as evidence of either genuine consensus or fragile suppression, with the structural fragility itself diagnostic of which. The cost-channel decomposition treats expression cost as decomposable into reputational, professional, social, political, and material sources, so interventions can target individual channels. The held-distribution-inference move treats the expressed distribution as a biased estimator and triangulates across alternative access channels — secret ballots, list experiments, randomised response — rather than trusting expressed-distribution data. And the endogeneity move recognises that each agent's expression decision uses an estimate of others' held distribution whose only available estimator is the expressed distribution, which is downstream of every agent's decision, so the perceived climate can drift far from the held distribution and must be broken through external measurement. The same reasoning that tells a pollster to use a list experiment tells a manager to use an anonymous survey, because both are reasoning about a biased expressed distribution under a cost asymmetry.

knowledge_transfer:
The transferable content of the prime is a sharp set of diagnostic questions and a substrate-portable intervention catalogue. A practitioner who has internalised preference falsification looks at any group, polity, market, or organisation and asks: whose held preference is at issue, what is the cost of voicing it relative to alternatives, who is voicing the cheaper alternative, and what would the observed distribution look like if the cost asymmetry were removed? The intervention catalogue — anonymity, list experiments, secret ballots, pioneer dissent, blind review, randomised response, whistleblower channels — transfers identically across substrates, because each targets the expression cost asymmetry that drives the gap in all of them.

The transfer is deep because the same structure licenses both historical reasoning and design. Sudden mass reorientations — the 1989 Eastern European cascades, the rapid collapse of de jure segregation, the rapid mainstreaming of same-sex-marriage acceptance, the harassment cascades — are recognisable as preference-cascade releases of long-falsified preferences rather than mass opinion change, marked by the diagnostic signature of rapid public reorientation following a small visible defection, with reports of long private dissent emerging from many participants.<!-- FACT-D69-107 -->[^kuran-1995] Romania in December 1989 makes this concrete: four decades of apparent public consensus masked an enormous held-versus-expressed gap sustained by severe expression cost, and the falsifying majority had no way to discover itself until a small section of a regime-organised crowd began to boo, the visible defection broke the cost structure, and the booing spread through the crowd in minutes as those who had been falsifying saw that defection was now possible and that they were not alone — the held distribution unchanged in those four days, only the expression cost structure. The same structure recurs in the post-meeting hallway where a junior engineer voiced no concern in the all-hands but sharp concern privately, and in the post-crash recognition that "everyone secretly thought the market was overvalued." On the design side, anyone building a mechanism for surfacing held preferences — an organisational survey, electoral system, peer-review process, board meeting, or market for dissent — can use the prime to diagnose where the cost asymmetry sits and which intervention reduces it, and because the intervention family is substrate-neutral the same moves apply whether the substrate is a totalitarian polity or an engineering all-hands. The strip-the-jargon form ("if people face a cost for saying what they really think, they say something cheaper, and the public distribution drifts away from the private distribution") does load-bearing work across authoritarian politics, corporate dynamics, academic orthodoxy, markets, voting behaviour, and social movements.

formal_abstract:
Cast as a threshold model of the perception loop, preference falsification yields a precise account of why suppressed consensus is fragile. Each agent $i$ privately opposes the regime but will voice that opposition publicly only if the perceived number of fellow dissenters already visible exceeds a personal threshold $\theta_i$ — the point at which the safety of numbers outweighs the *expression cost*.<!-- FACT-D69-108 -->[^granovetter-1978] The *held distribution* is the full set of private oppositions; the *expressed distribution* is only those agents whose threshold has been crossed. The decisive structural fact is the *perception loop*: each agent's threshold is evaluated against the *visible* count, which is itself the output of everyone's threshold decisions, so the visible count can sit stably at near-zero even when the held opposition is near-universal — a self-consistent equilibrium of mutual misperception. This equilibrium is *fragile* in a way the model makes exact: a single visible defection raises the observed count past the lowest threshold, that agent's defection raises it past the next, and the system can unravel in a cascade if the threshold distribution is dense enough that each newly-revealed dissenter unlocks the next. The held distribution never changes during the cascade — only the *cost structure*, perturbed by the first visible defection, shifts. The model thereby distinguishes the prime sharply from its neighbours: it is not conformity (no private preference is altered), not an information cascade (the driver is expression cost, not Bayesian updating on others' signals), and not costly signalling (the agents are hiding, not conveying, private information).

**Mapped back:** Private opposition is the held preference, the safety-in-numbers threshold encodes the expression-cost asymmetry, the visible dissenter count is the expressed distribution feeding the perception loop, and the cascade triggered by one defection is the cost-structure-shock fragility — preference falsification rendered as a threshold model whose equilibrium is consensus-masking and whose instability is exact.

applied_industry:
Romania in December 1989 and a corporate all-hands run the identical structure at vastly different scales. Under the Ceaușescu regime, four decades of apparent public consensus masked an enormous *held-versus-expressed gap* sustained by severe expression cost — the secret police made voicing opposition career-ending or worse.<!-- FACT-D69-109 -->[^kuran-1995] The falsifying majority had no way to discover itself, because the only available estimator of held opinion was the uniformly loyal *expressed* distribution. At a regime-organised rally, a small section of the crowd began to boo; this *visible defection* broke the perceived cost structure, and the booing spread through tens of thousands in minutes as each person who had been falsifying saw both that defection was now possible and that they were not alone.<!-- FACT-D69-110 -->[^kuran-1991] The held distribution did not change in those minutes — only the expression cost did — which is the prime's signature of a *preference cascade* rather than mass opinion change.<!-- FACT-D69-111 -->[^kuran-1991] The same structure, with the cost dialled down, governs a corporate all-hands: a junior engineer voices no concern about a flawed product decision in the meeting (where dissent carries reputational and career cost in front of senior leadership) but voices sharp concern in the post-meeting hallway, and a settled "unanimous" boardroom position turns out to be unanimous private skepticism. The matched intervention family is substrate-neutral and channel-targeted: anonymity (the secret ballot, the anonymous engineering survey) removes the cost asymmetry directly, aggregated revelation (list experiments, anonymized polls) yields population signal without individual exposure, and pioneer dissent (one visible defector, one leader who voices doubt first) lowers the isolation cost for everyone behind them. A reformer auditing a regime's apparent stability and a manager designing an all-hands feedback channel are reasoning about the same biased expressed distribution under a cost asymmetry.

**Mapped back:** Loyal public conduct and meeting silence are the strategically expressed preferences; private opposition and private skepticism are the held preferences; the secret police and the career-risk-in-front-of-leadership are the expression-cost asymmetries; the spreading boos and the hallway conversation are the cost-shock releases — the same prime in authoritarian politics and corporate decision-making.


Preference Heterogeneity and Conflict

one_liner: Incompatible agent preferences create impasses and partial dissatisfaction.

origin_domain: psychology

core_idea: Preference heterogeneity and conflict is the structural condition where different agents in a system hold substantively incompatible preferences, goals, or values that cannot simultaneously be fully satisfied, creating decision impasses or outcomes in which all agents experience partial dissatisfaction, a condition Arrow (1951) established as foundational to social choice theory. <!-- FACT-D53-346 -->[^arrow-1951] Unlike logistical coordination problems (which have technical solutions), preference conflict is fundamentally about irreconcilable wants. The condition arises because agents prioritize different ends: one person's gain is another's loss; one stakeholder's ideal outcome precludes another's, as Schelling (1960) developed in his analysis of mixed-motive interaction. <!-- FACT-D53-347 -->[^schelling-1960] This prime concerns the structural irreducibility of these collisions—situations where no allocation, policy, or mechanism can leave all parties fully satisfied.

structural_signature:
Preference heterogeneity encodes a structural pattern: **incompatible_objectives → decision_impasse → partial_satisfaction_outcomes**. The signature separates systems where preferences can be aligned (through better communication, incentive design, or procedural focus) from systems where preferences are fundamentally misaligned (divergent values, zero-sum resource allocation, trade-offs in inherent opposition), a separation Sen (1970) develops rigorously in *Collective Choice and Social Welfare*. <!-- FACT-D53-348 -->[^sen-1970]

**Recurring features:**

- Incompatible preferences cannot be simultaneously fully satisfied
- Multi-objective tension where optimization for one agent degrades outcomes for another
- Zero-sum resource allocation or value-trade situations
- Agents with divergent utility functions or hierarchies of values
- Decision impasse requiring aggregation rather than perfect alignment
- Partial dissatisfaction across all stakeholders as stable outcome

The structural insight is robust across scales: a two-person bargaining dispute, a corporation with competing departments, a multi-stakeholder environmental governance system, and an international climate negotiation all exhibit the same irreducible-heterogeneity logic, as Pruitt and Rubin (1986) document in their cross-scale treatment of social conflict. <!-- FACT-D53-349 -->[^pruitt-rubin-1986]

what_it_is_not:
Preference heterogeneity is not mere disagreement about facts or means. Disagreement about empirical questions—Does climate change accelerate? Will this policy reduce emissions? What is the effect size?—is often resolvable through evidence, shared epistemic standards, and careful analysis. Disagreement about means—Which policy best achieves our shared goal?—is often resolvable through technical analysis and comparative effectiveness research. Both involve questions about the world's properties, not about values. Preference heterogeneity, by contrast, concerns irreconcilable differences in what is valued, what counts as desirable, what trade-offs people will accept. Stakeholders may fully agree on facts (climate change is real, acceleration is measurable) and still experience heterogeneous preferences (one prioritizes economic growth, another ecosystem preservation). The conflict is axiological, not epistemic.

Nor is preference heterogeneity identical to coordination problems. Coordination problems arise when agents share a common goal but lack synchronization, focal points, or shared understanding of how to align. Disagreement about how to implement a shared platform, which moment to meet, or which standard to adopt are coordination problems—preferences can ultimately align once clarity is established. Preference heterogeneity, by contrast, involves agents with genuinely irreconcilable wants. No amount of clearer communication, shared understanding, or focal-point establishment will fully satisfy both a person who wants low prices and one who wants high wages in a labor transaction. The conflict is not resolvable through coordination; it requires aggregation mechanisms that leave all parties partially dissatisfied.

Preference heterogeneity is also not identical to diversity or pluralism, though the terms are sometimes conflated. Diversity and pluralism often refer to the existence of multiple perspectives, cultures, or value systems, which is potentially healthy and enriching. Heterogeneous preferences, by contrast, emphasize *conflict* and *incompatibility*. A diverse, pluralistic society might have many viewpoints that are complementary or orthogonal; heterogeneous preferences exist where viewpoints collide and cannot coexist. Diversity can be a resource; heterogeneous preferences pose a governance problem.

It is not equivalent to preference *change* or volatility. Preferences can be unstable—people change their minds, learn, develop new values. This is temporal or developmental, not structural. Preference heterogeneity is the cross-sectional fact of incompatibility *at a moment*, before any preference change occurs. Understanding heterogeneity does not require assuming preferences are fixed; it requires acknowledging that *at the time decisions are being made*, different agents want different things, and those things cannot all be achieved simultaneously.

Finally, preference heterogeneity is not a claim about what *ought* to satisfy everyone. Some heterogeneous preferences may reflect unjust desires (discriminatory preferences, preferences based on false beliefs, preferences that harm others). Naming preference heterogeneity is not saying that all preferences deserve equal weight or that conflicts cannot be resolved through ethical reasoning, reform, or redistribution. It is saying that *at a structural level*, when agents have different preferences, institutions must manage that conflict through aggregation mechanisms rather than wishing it away or assuming it is merely apparent and resolvable through dialogue.

broad_use:
**Negotiation and dispute resolution:** Labor-management conflicts (workers want higher wages and better conditions, managers want lower labor costs and operational flexibility), environmental disputes (development advocates want economic growth, conservation advocates want ecosystem preservation), family inheritance disputes (different heirs value different uses or recipients of assets), real-estate bargaining (sellers want high prices, buyers want low prices), domains Fisher, Ury, and Patton (1991) treat in their canonical negotiation framework. <!-- FACT-D53-356 -->[^fisher-ury-patton-1991]

**Organizational governance and politics:** Department heads compete for limited budget allocation; shareholders with different time horizons (long-term growth vs. near-term dividends) conflict over investment strategy; employees want flexible schedules while managers need synchronous coordination; IT departments prioritize security and system stability while end-users prioritize convenience and rapid feature deployment.

**Public goods provision:** Communities disagree on school curricula (parents want different values, cultural frameworks, or skill emphases taught); policing strategies (communities want both safety and de-escalation, tensions that require trade-off choices); public spending priorities (transportation vs. schools vs. parks vs. healthcare; finite budgets mean some preferences remain unmet); environmental regulation (industrial operators want minimal constraints, environmental advocates want strong protections).

**Commons management:** Fishing communities conflict over catch limits (individual fishers want maximum catch to maximize income, collective sustainability wants restraint to preserve the resource); groundwater users conflict over extraction rates (agricultural users want maximum availability, urban planners want reserves for population growth); pastoral communities conflict over grazing intensity (individual herders benefit from maximum herd size, ecological stability requires constraint), a tension Ostrom (1990) analyzes across diverse common-pool resource regimes. <!-- FACT-D53-357 -->[^ostrom-1990]

**Trade-off situations in design and engineering:** User-interface designers balance complexity and simplicity (power users want advanced features, novices want ease of use); software architects balance consistency and flexibility (standardization supports coordination, customization supports heterogeneous needs); urban planners balance density and open space (residents want affordable housing proximity, others want parks and greenery); supply chain managers balance cost and resilience (cost minimization favors concentrated suppliers, risk management favors redundancy), trade-offs Keeney and Raiffa (1976) formalize as multi-attribute decision problems with conflicting objectives. <!-- FACT-D53-358 -->[^keeney-raiffa-1976]

clarity:
A core function of "preference heterogeneity and conflict" is to distinguish between **logistical problems** (coordination, information, or resource gaps that can be closed through better communication or procedure) and **structural problems** (fundamental divergence of interests that cannot be eliminated, only managed through aggregation or power dynamics), a separation Deutsch (1973) makes central to his theory of conflict resolution. <!-- FACT-D53-359 -->[^deutsch-1973] Many apparent impasses are actually coordination problems misdiagnosed as preference conflicts. A team thinks they have incompatible goals when they merely lack a focal point; a negotiation stalls because parties haven't clearly signaled constraints or made their constraints credible. A supply-chain conflict appears to be about misaligned priorities until stakeholders recognize they have identical objectives but different time horizons. But true preference heterogeneity is irreducible: even with perfect information, full transparency, and ideal coordination, the preferences remain opposed. A buyer's preference for low prices and a seller's preference for high prices are not resolvable through better communication; they reflect irreconcilable interests in the transaction. Clarifying this distinction redirects effort from futile attempts at perfect alignment to realistic governance mechanisms that acknowledge conflict and manage it through transparent rules and procedures.

It also clarifies why aggregation mechanisms—voting, bargaining, majority rule, randomization, weighted prioritization, consensus-building with embedded dissent—are necessary features of multi-agent systems rather than signs of failure or poor management. If preferences could be perfectly aligned, such mechanisms would be unnecessary and governance could rely on consensus-seeking or unilateral decision-making. Their ubiquity across organizations, markets, democracies, and families indicates that heterogeneity is normal and structurally persistent, a finding Black (1958) demonstrates in his theory of committees and elections. <!-- FACT-D53-360 -->[^black-1958] The question becomes not "How can we eliminate conflict?" (an impossible aspiration) but "Which aggregation mechanism best reflects our values, distributes power fairly, and produces stable yet adaptive outcomes?" This reframing accepts the irreducibility of heterogeneity and focuses design effort on mechanisms that are transparent, procedurally just, and capable of managing change as preferences and circumstances evolve.

manages_complexity:
In organizations with hundreds of stakeholders and thousands of potential decisions, preference heterogeneity becomes ubiquitous and unavoidable. Rather than attempt the impossible aspiration of universal satisfaction or seamless consensus, reframing through this prime clarifies that satisfactory governance requires explicit, transparent mechanisms for preference aggregation: voting systems with specified rules, representation structures that weight stakeholder voices, deliberative processes that make trade-offs visible, prioritization frameworks that rank competing claims, randomization when no principled rule suffices, and sequential decision-making that manages cascade effects. This analytical clarity prevents futile, exhausting attempts at consensus where preferences are irreducibly opposed, and focuses leadership energy on designing aggregation rules that are just, transparent, and perceived as legitimate by stakeholders.

It also clarifies where conflict is genuine (preferences truly incompatible and zero-sum) versus apparent or resolvable (different preferences on different issues, where bundling, vote-trading, or creative reframing enables mutual gains). A corporation facing a budget conflict between a cost-cutting department and an innovation department may initially appear hopelessly divided; but analyzing preference structures often reveals that sequential voting (cost-cutting in year one, innovation investment in year two), bundling (cost-cuts in routine operations coupled with innovation in high-impact areas), or reframing (positioning cost-reduction as enabling sustainability investments) enables mutual gains. Understanding heterogeneity avoids both naive hopes for perfect agreement and cynical resignation to power-based allocation where only the strongest stakeholders matter. Instead, it enables designing institutions that acknowledge conflict while distributing influence and satisfaction fairly.

abstract_reasoning:
Preference heterogeneity instantiates the principle that **multi-agent systems with diverse objectives require governance mechanisms, not just coordination tools**. This principle recurs across ecological systems (predators prefer prey-rich environments; prey prefer predator-free environments; this conflict produces predator-prey dynamics and coevolutionary cycles), evolutionary arms races (host and parasite preferences diverge; the conflict drives perpetual coevolution), organizational markets (buyers prefer low prices; sellers prefer high prices; market-clearing mechanisms balance the conflict through price discovery), and democratic governance (citizens have diverse policy preferences; voting mechanisms aggregate them into collective decisions).

The structural insight enables powerful counterfactual reasoning: "What if we altered the distribution of preferences?" "What if we changed the aggregation rule?" "What if we reframed the decision to reduce the apparent conflict?" These questions open design spaces for institutions and policies.

knowledge_transfer: The pattern—incompatible preferences, decision impasse, aggregation mechanism, partial satisfaction—transfers cleanly across domains at vastly different scales. A marketplace resolves preference heterogeneity between buyers and sellers through price mechanisms and quantity adjustments; a legislature resolves citizen preference heterogeneity through voting and representative procedures; a family resolves heterogeneous preferences about resource use or vacation plans through negotiation, bargaining, and sequential decision-making; a hospital with competing departments (surgery, oncology, emergency medicine) resolves heterogeneity through annual budgeting rules, case-by-case triage, and interdepartmental negotiation over shared resources. In each case, the mechanism differs, but the structural pattern is identical: preferences conflict, perfect satisfaction is impossible, and a governance mechanism distributes the satisfaction-dissatisfaction across stakeholders according to some rule. The vocabulary and reasoning of preference heterogeneity help practitioners in one domain recognize and apply insights from another. A policy analyst familiar with voting systems (Condorcet cycles, strategic voting, preference-intensity problems) might recognize the same preference-aggregation logic in market pricing (arbitrage, price discovery, consumer surplus); an organizational leader familiar with interdepartmental negotiation over budgets might see the parallel to international trade negotiation (bilateral agreements, comparative advantage, gains from trade) or community governance (town halls, deliberation, majority rule with minority protections). This cross-domain transfer is not merely metaphorical; it reflects deep structural similarities in how systems with heterogeneous agents manage irreducible conflicts.

formal_abstract:
**Labor negotiation:** A manufacturing firm and its workforce negotiate a new contract. Workers want wage increases (8% requested), expanded healthcare coverage, and scheduling flexibility. Management wants minimal labor-cost increases (2% maximum), reduced benefits obligations, and scheduling coordination. These preferences are genuinely incompatible: an 8% wage increase plus expanded benefits is unacceptable to management; a 2% increase and reduced benefits is unacceptable to workers. No amount of clarification of facts or goals will align these preferences. The conflict is structural. Resolution requires aggregation: negotiation between representatives, offer-and-counteroffer sequencing, and ultimately a negotiated compromise where wages increase 4–5%, benefits shift (some expanded, some constrained), and scheduling becomes more flexible than management preferred but less so than workers wanted. All parties experience partial dissatisfaction. The conflict has not been resolved (preferences remain incompatible); rather, it has been managed through a power-weighted and procedurally governed aggregation mechanism.

**Environmental policy:** A river-basin governance system includes agricultural users (want maximum water allocation for irrigation), urban municipalities (want reliable urban supply), hydroelectric dam operators (want high water levels for power generation), and environmental advocates (want minimum flows to support ecosystems). These preferences conflict structurally. No allocation satisfies all preferences. Agricultural interests want 60% of flow; municipalities want 30%; dam operators want high minimum pool levels; environmental advocates want 40% minimum flows. The pie is fixed; satisfying one stakeholder's preferences de-satisfies another's. Governance mechanisms (seasonal allocation rules, allocation prioritization, environmental offset trading) distribute the conflict and produce outcomes where all parties remain partially dissatisfied. The mechanism does not resolve the heterogeneity; it manages it through transparent allocation rules.

applied_industry:
**Product design for heterogeneous users:** A software company designs a project-management tool. Power-users want advanced features, API extensibility, and customization depth. Novice users want simplicity, pre-configured templates, and minimal learning curve. These preferences are opposed: adding advanced features increases complexity and steepness of the learning curve; simplifying interfaces removes capabilities power-users need. The company cannot perfectly satisfy both. Resolution requires aggregation: modular interface design (basic mode for novices, advanced mode for power-users), tiered pricing (advanced features at premium tier), and documentation/training that acknowledges the preference heterogeneity and helps users choose their experience level. Users experience partial satisfaction—novices get simplicity but lack advanced capabilities; power-users get depth but face interface complexity not necessary for their needs.

**Urban land-use planning:** A city faces preference heterogeneity in land use: developers want high-density residential or commercial zoning (maximizing return on investment), existing residents want preservation of neighborhood character and open space, environmental advocates want habitat or park designation, and transit planners want density near transit nodes. These preferences conflict structurally. No zoning satisfies all preferences. A mixed-strategy resolution (zoning diversity across neighborhoods, incentives for transit-adjacent density, preservation of some greenspace, compromise heights and densities) manages rather than resolves the heterogeneity. Each stakeholder experiences partial satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

title: Preference heterogeneity is irreducible, yet acknowledging irreducibility risks justifying inaction or power-based outcomes

body: If preferences truly conflict and cannot be reconciled, some stakeholders' preferences will remain unmet. This structural fact is unavoidable. Yet acknowledging it can become an excuse for dismissing concern with fair or just aggregation ("preferences conflict, so any outcome is as valid as another"). The tension is between accepting irreducibility and maintaining commitment to processes (voting, negotiation, deliberation) that ensure all preferences are heard and weighted, even though not all can be satisfied.

title: Aggregation mechanisms must treat preferences as revealed, yet revealed preferences may be strategic or self-deceptive

body: Voting, bargaining, and other mechanisms assume participants truthfully reveal preferences. But strategic actors may misrepresent to improve their position; participants may self-deceive about their true preferences or the trade-offs they will accept. The tension is between taking preferences at face value (and risk being manipulated) and digging deeper (risking paternalism, where decision-makers override stated preferences based on presumed "true" interests).

title: Acknowledging preference heterogeneity validates all preferences as legitimate, yet not all preferences deserve equal weight

body: Some preferences are based on false beliefs, harm others, or conflict with justice principles. Heterogeneity-language risks treating all preferences symmetrically—a bigot's preference for discrimination as equally valid as a marginalized group's preference for inclusion. The tension is between respecting agents as preference-holders and judging preferences by normative standards.

title: Preference heterogeneity is often described as if preferences are exogenous and fixed, yet preferences are endogenous and malleable

body: Over time, preferences change through learning, socialization, and deliberation. What appears as fixed heterogeneity may shift if time, dialogue, or changed circumstances allow preference evolution. The tension is between treating heterogeneity as a structural fact requiring management and viewing it as potentially remediable through deliberation, education, or institution-building.

title: Aggregation mechanisms that produce stable partial satisfaction may entrench unfair distributions and prevent more just outcomes

body: A voting rule or negotiated compromise may be stable and procedurally fair, yet distribute burdens unfairly (some groups consistently lose). The mechanism validates the outcome as "legitimate," potentially blocking reform toward greater justice. The tension is between accepting stable, procedurally valid compromises and pushing toward more equitable underlying preference distributions.

title: Framing preference heterogeneity as structural and inevitable can obscure the historical and political processes that produced the heterogeneity in the first place

body: Preference heterogeneity is not purely exogenous; it often results from previous power distributions, institutional choices, and historical inequities. A stable preference for lower labor costs may reflect prior capital accumulation; environmental preferences may reflect unequal access to clean air. Treating heterogeneity as inevitable fact rather than contingent product of politics risks legitimizing unjust distributions.

prose:
1. **Preference aggregation via voting:** Establish voting rules (majority rule, supermajority, proportional representation) that aggregate heterogeneous preferences into collective decisions. Requires specifying domain, voter population, and decision rule.

2. **Market-clearing mechanisms:** Use prices, auctions, or market exchange to resolve preference heterogeneity between buyers and sellers. Preferences are aggregated through supply-and-demand dynamics and price discovery.

3. **Negotiated bargaining:** Establish bargaining protocols where representatives of stakeholder groups negotiate offers and counteroffers until agreement is reached. Outcomes reflect both parties' preferences weighted by bargaining power and leverage.

4. **Deliberative processes:** Create forums where stakeholders articulate preferences, hear others' reasoning, and seek common ground or mutual understanding. Often produces preference evolution rather than aggregation of fixed preferences.

5. **Sequential decision-making:** Decompose a large decision into a sequence of smaller decisions, each with different preference weightings or stakeholder involvement. Early decisions create constraints on later ones, managing overall heterogeneity.

6. **Randomization and lottery:** When preferences conflict symmetrically and no principled aggregation rule exists, use randomization (lottery, coin flip, random assignment) to distribute outcomes fairly.

7. **Preference bundling and vote-trading:** Allow stakeholders to bundle issues and trade votes—stakeholder A prioritizes issue X while B prioritizes Y, enabling mutual gain through sequential or bundled voting.

8. **Institutional redesign:** Alter the decision space, stakeholder set, or information structure to reduce apparent preference heterogeneity. Often reveals that heterogeneity was partly apparent (resolvable through better process) rather than structural (irreducibly opposed).

notes:
Preference heterogeneity is ubiquitous in large-scale social systems, yet often goes unacknowledged in practice. Organizations often attempt consensus-seeking when preferences are irreducibly heterogeneous, leading to endless deliberation and resentment. Acknowledging heterogeneity directly—"we have incompatible preferences; here is how we will aggregate them fairly"—can paradoxically reduce conflict and increase acceptance of outcomes.

The prime closely relates to concepts of justice and fairness, but must be kept distinct. Fairness concerns the principles or procedures for aggregating preferences; preference heterogeneity concerns the fact of incompatibility. A system can be unfair while managing preference heterogeneity, or fair while failing to acknowledge heterogeneity.

Preference heterogeneity differs from preference diversity. Diversity may be valuable (multiple perspectives, creativity, robustness); heterogeneity highlights conflict and incompatibility. A system can be diverse and harmonious if preferences are complementary; heterogeneous preferences create tension and require explicit management.

The temporal dimension is critical. Preferences may appear heterogeneous at one moment but aligned in a longer timeframe as stakeholders' circumstances change. Short-term preference conflicts (current residents want stability, developers want growth) may reflect deeper alignment (all want community prosperity, but disagree on means and timescale). Temporal framing affects how heterogeneity is perceived and managed.

Preference heterogeneity can arise from genuine value differences (axiology) or from conflicting material interests (one party's gain is another's loss). These may require different resolution approaches: value conflicts may benefit from deliberation and mutual understanding; material conflicts may require resource redistribution or procedural fairness.