---
slug: stated_preference
name: Stated Preference
one_liner: "Infer an agent's valuation from what it reports rather than from what it chooses — the solicited-report, cheap-talk pole of the report-versus-choice axis whose dual is revealed_preference."
type: prime
schema_version: 2
status: density_v2_draft
categories: [epistemic, economic, social]
origin_domain: economics
alternate_origin_domains: [survey_methodology, decision_theory, cognition_and_psychology]
aliases: [declared_preference, expressed_preference, elicited_preference, self_report_preference, say_do_gap]
related: []
solution_archetypes: []
review_flags:
- "OPERATOR-DERIVED (op-01 dualization, sub-flavor 1a/1b) — the evidence-channel dual of `revealed_preference` along the report-vs-choice (say vs do) axis. Discovered in the op-01 full sweep 2026-07-03. Verified absent via search_prime + slug check; no existing stated_preference/declared_preference slug. STATUS: HOLD — pending owner curation."
- "Created 2026-07-03; STUB ONLY (frontmatter + Core Idea + Notes). Did NOT go through Phase-A triage. SI/SF/similarity grades are PROPOSER ESTIMATES pending triangulation. Body sections (Structural Signature onward) NOT yet written."
- "Phase-C action: re-similarity-check vs revealed_preference / cheap_talk / signaling / self_report to confirm it is a distinct pole and not a mere methodology label; if kept, draw the sibling edge to revealed_preference and the parent edge to whatever governs report-vs-choice evidence channels; sync one_liner to a v1 draft per CLAUDE.md before merge."
substrate_independence:
  composite_substrate_independence: 3
  domain_breadth: 3
  structural_abstraction: 3
  transfer_evidence: 3
  reasoning: 'The rule "read an agent''s valuation off a solicited report rather than off a costly choice" is a definite structural relation on an evidence channel, but it is closer to its economic/survey home than eager_evaluation is to computing: much of its content is bound up with human reporting, elicitation instruments, and the incentive asymmetry between talk and action. Structural abstraction is a middling 3 because the core relation (query the agent, take the answer as the datum) does generalize — to a sensor reporting a self-diagnostic instead of being tested under load, or a model asked to state a policy rather than being observed acting — but the sharpest, most-studied instances (contingent valuation, surveys, polls, self-reports) are human-communication-bound. Domain breadth is 3 and transfer evidence is 3: real cross-domain reach exists (measurement, ML preference elicitation, self-report psychology) but the canonical evidence clusters in economics and survey methodology. Composite 3 — a genuinely transferable but partly frame-tinted pattern.'
similarity_to_nearest_existing_prime:
  slug: revealed_preference
  similarity: 0.72
structural_framed:
  label: mixed-framed
  aggregate: 0.5
  criteria: {vocab_travels: 0.4, evaluative_weight: 0.3, institutional_origin: 0.5, human_practice_bound: 0.7, import_vs_recognize: 0.4}
  rationale: 'Stated preference reads notably more framed than its dual. The structure — take a solicited report as the evidence of valuation — is medium-neutral in principle, but its live content is bound to human elicitation practices (surveys, polls, contingent-valuation studies) and to an incentive story (talk is cheap, so reports may be strategic or insincere) that is a normative/behavioral claim, not a bare relation. It carries a survey-methodology vocabulary that must partly travel, and its origin is as much an institutional measurement practice as a formal object, so human_practice_bound is high (0.7) and the aggregate sits mid-spectrum.'
phase_b_passes_completed: []
---
# Stated Preference

## Core Idea

Stated preference is the structural commitment to *infer an agent's valuation from what it reports when asked, rather than from what it chooses when it acts*. The defining move is to treat the *solicited report* — the answer an agent gives when queried about what it wants, would pay, or would choose — as the load-bearing evidence about its underlying valuation, accepting a verbal or declared channel as primary even though that channel carries no opportunity cost. It is one pole of a single structural axis, *which channel carries the evidence of value* — report versus choice, saying versus doing — whose opposite pole is `revealed_preference` (infer value only from costly, observed choices). Stated preference is the *ask-and-believe* pole; revealed preference is the *watch-and-infer* pole. The whole content of each prime is which channel it trusts.

Three commitments define the pattern and generate its characteristic trade. First, an *elicitation act*: value is obtained by querying the agent — a question, a survey, a solicited ranking — rather than by observing it choose under a real budget. Second, a *low-cost channel*: because reporting carries no opportunity cost (nothing is forgone by saying "I prefer X"), the report is cheap to produce, which is exactly what makes it both easy to collect and easy to distort. Third, an *accessibility payoff*: the report can reach valuations that no choice ever reveals — hypothetical options, goods not yet on any market, contingencies the agent has never faced, or the value of things (a wilderness, a policy, a life-year) for which no real transaction exists to observe. The trade is sharp and is the prime's diagnostic fingerprint. The payoff is *reach*: stated preference can measure willingness-to-pay for the non-existent, the hypothetical, and the not-yet-chosen, where revealed preference is silent because there is no choice trace to read. The cost is *the say-do gap*: because the channel is costless, reports may be insincere, strategic, hypothetical-biased, or simply mistaken about the agent's own future behavior, so a stated valuation can diverge — sometimes wildly — from what the same agent would actually do when a real cost is on the line. The prime is the clean statement of that trade: *reach-but-cheap-talk versus grounded-but-mute*, abstracted from any particular instrument.

Read structurally, the pattern is one object across several substrates wherever value or intent is read off a *report* instead of an *enacted choice*. In economics and environmental valuation it is *contingent valuation* and *stated-preference surveys*: asking people what they would pay for a public good rather than observing a purchase. In survey and polling methodology it is the *declared* answer — vote intention, satisfaction rating, stated priority — taken at face value. In psychology it is the *self-report*: a person's stated attitude, mood, or motive, known to diverge from behavioral measures. In machine-learning preference elicitation it is querying a model or user for a *stated* ranking or a spoken policy rather than logging their actions. In each case the recognizable move is the same — obtain the valuation by asking, accept the low-cost channel, and thereby gain access to the hypothetical at the price of trusting talk that costs nothing to falsify.

## Notes

**Provenance.** Produced by op-01 dualization (sub-flavors 1a and 1b) as the evidence-channel dual of `revealed_preference` along the report-vs-choice (say-vs-do) axis, in the op-01 full sweep on 2026-07-03. The pair-completion signal is strong: revealed_preference is an existing prime, and "stated preference" is its established, named antonym in economics — the two are routinely defined against each other, which is exactly the lattice-gap signature the dualization operator targets.

**For owner evaluation (keep/cut).** The case FOR: this is a clean, named, textbook dual of an accepted prime, and the axis it completes (report vs. choice as the evidence channel for latent value) is genuinely structural — it recurs beyond economics into psychology (self-report vs. behavior), polling, and ML preference elicitation, and it names a real, load-bearing invariant (the say-do gap and the costless-channel trade-off). Keeping it would balance the lattice: right now the corpus has the "infer from costly action" pole but not the "take the solicited report" pole. The specific risk flagged in the manifest is a **measurement-category concern**: sonnet graded ACCEPT but the frontier check downgraded to HOLD because stated preference may be *a methodology contrast rather than a prime* — i.e., "stated-preference survey" vs. "revealed-preference analysis" reads to some as two research methods, not two structures. The counter is that revealed_preference itself already sits in the corpus as a structure, not a method, so its dual has at least equal claim; the question for Kurt is whether the *pair* is one prime (a single report-vs-choice axis, of which each pole is a facet) or two. There is also a **screen-overlap risk** with `cheap_talk`/`signaling` (the costless-channel insight overlaps the cheap-talk literature) and with a generic `self_report` notion — re-similarity-check against those before incorporation. Note the SF grade: this candidate reads meaningfully *more framed* (aggregate ~0.5) than its structural dual, because its live content is bound to human elicitation practices and an incentive story; that asymmetry is itself decision-relevant (a genuine axis can have one structural pole and one more-framed pole, but it's worth Kurt confirming that's acceptable).

**At incorporation.** Re-run similarity against `revealed_preference`, `cheap_talk`, `signaling`, and any `self_report` prime to confirm it does not collapse into one of them; if the say-do axis is judged a single prime with two poles rather than two primes, fold accordingly. If kept as a distinct prime, draw the sibling edge to `revealed_preference` (mutual/antonym) and a parent edge to whatever governs evidence-channel selection (report vs. observation). Resolve the framed asymmetry (this pole vs. its structural dual) at densification. Sync the one_liner to a v1 draft per CLAUDE.md before merge.
