Behavioral Economics

Social Preferences

This guide helps you get your bearings in Social Preferences before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.

Before You Dive In

Social Preferences studies systematic deviations from the fully rational benchmark in decision and market behavior.
Rough timeline: expected-utility critiques -> heuristics and biases -> social preferences and field experiments -> behavioral market design and policy nudges.
Start with prospect theory and reference dependence; they anchor many behavioral results.
Use Noosaga to compare frameworks by mechanism: cognition limits, social norms, emotions, or identity.

Prospect theoryDecision model featuring reference dependence and loss aversion.

Present biasTendency to overweight immediate outcomes relative to future outcomes.

Social preferencesPreferences involving fairness, reciprocity, or inequality aversion.

NudgeChoice-architecture intervention that steers behavior without banning options.

Bounded rationalityDecision-making under limits in information, computation, and attention.

Treating behavioral findings as rejection of all rational-choice analysis.

Assuming lab anomalies automatically generalize to high-stakes field contexts.

Confusing paternalistic policy design with welfare-improving design under explicit criteria.

Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?

Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.

See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.

Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.