[Pe platforma de peer-review Punct ochit]
Questioning research questions
Ianuarie 2012
My PhD. project emerged from the need to find an answer to why people, sometimes, seem to make suboptimal decisions? The intuitive answer to the previous question would be that people sometimes deal with difficult decisions, i.e decisions which people are either not prepared to address or which require a choice between things they don’t want to choose from. The answer generally provided by rational choice theory and moreover, by game theory, where people try to get the most given the constraints they have, is that people are always able to define a preference over some set of payoffs. The project I proposed would come to handle situations in which people cannot trivially define a preference over the set of payoffs.
This aim, nevertheless, was left unspoken for some time, because I had initially built my proposal over the answer I had given to this question, without actually verbalizing the question. When I first proposed this project two years ago, I argued that unlike the standard view in rational choice theory, the apparently suboptimal decisions, could be motivated by an attempt to maximize more than one game with one actor, but the outcome of more games at the same time, involving several actors. More than this, I wanted to show that in some cultures, the actors perceive more often than in others the existence of a third alternative, which is negotiate the rules of the game. This is why I first constructed my project around the subject of law obedience and I wanted to see the cases when people would disobey the law or re-negotiate the law. On the other hand, one may think that when people have to make difficult decisions they first try to find a custom, norm, rule or law that simplifies their choice. But, then comes the question of why norms (Hechter and Opp, 2001) and laws (Tyler, 1990) are not so often obeyed, if they provide the cheaper (in terms of cognitive resources) way to solve their difficult decisions.
Law obedience was a very general topic and in pursuing this interest, I needed to find an application to my very general interest, which took me to take an interest in tax compliance in different cultures. While studying the theoretical background of tax compliance in different cultures I concluded, based on the literature, that paying ones taxes or not was most of the times a solution to a very clear set of incentives and constraints. But, in trying to collect the qualitative data, problems were raised by the very low participation rate of the selected interviewees. Despite these difficulties, the few unrecorded discussions that I was able to make suggested that the tax compliance issue was a difficult decision when the act of paying ones taxes was seen as interfering with the relationships the social actor had with other important people in his/her life. This idea related highly with the findings in my MA thesis, where one of the surprising results was that the most important payoff in the volunteer’s dilemma game that my interviewees perceived was a relationship formation. At this point I realized that I missed a model that would integrate relationships alongside the laws or the rules into the decision-making process. But how can one evaluate ‘how much’ a relationship is worth? Does anyone make such comparisons? And what is a relationship anyway and how do we know we ‘have’ a relationship? All these questions sought answer before I could go on.
In the mean time, I was working on my game theoretical model, trying to formally define what a difficult decision was. I defined it as a decision made between categories that are not comparable, that is the player in a game does not have a preference over some set of alternatives, and is not indifferent to them, either: the player wants to have both outcomes. Of course, this was only possible if the actor was involved in multiple games at the same time, or parallel games. Therefore, it became crucial that I find such examples of uncomparable preferences and I study them.
The need to integrate rules and relationships in the decision-making model and to find uncomparable categories of payoffs led me to shift my interest from tax compliance to the literature on work-life ballance. In other words, rules and relationships could potentially be such uncomparable preferences and they were likely to be studied by looking at the way people decide between their work-related obligations (governed by formal rules) and their relationship’s demands (governed by relationships). On top of everything, this field of study was much easier to study in the field as people were much more willing to talk about their work-life ballance, than they were willing to talk about how they decided to pay their taxes.
Alongside my attempts to formalize my ideas, I was surveying the game theoretical literature in search of a model similar to mine which had already been established. Recently I found the model I was searching for in George Tsebelis’ (1990) book on nested games. Tsebelis (1990) applied his theory to political science and he proposed two types of nested games: games in multiple arenas and institutional games. While games in multiple arenas are games the actor plays with different other actors, in different situations, the institutional games are games made around making the laws that regulate the previous interactions. Just like me, Tsebelis built his models to answer why people sometimes seem to make suboptimal decisions. Based on the nested games model and the distinction between the actor’s and the observer’s perspective, he was able to argue that the actor’s choice would seem erroneous either to the observer who has a different opinion than the actor related to which the ‘correct’ decision is or to the observer who does not take into consideration all the games the actor perceives himself/herself to be involved in.
My own contribution to this theory is two fold. First, I argue that there is another reason why people sometimes seem to take suboptimal decisions and that is because they cannot or do not want to choose between some payoffs, as they belong to categories of payoffs which are not comparable. Secondly, I argue that there are four ways in which the utility obtained from the games in arenas which have outcomes from uncomparable categories aggregate together and they correspond to the four main strategies people use when trying to ballance their work-related requirements and their familiy-related demands: segmentation, compensation, fixed resources and spill-over (Voydanoff, 2001). Leaving aside for a moment the question of being able to compute the utility for each type of game, given that different types of payoffs means they may be pecuniary or not, we can briefly define each aggregation strategy. Segmentation refers to defining a minimum threshold for each utility from each game. Compensation refers to a strategy of the type: if the utility in one game is less than the actor’s minimal threshold, then the actor will invest all efforts in the other game. The fixed resources strategy uses a list of desired payoffs in all games and an evaluation of the available resources, but instead of defining a minimal threshold of the utilities in each game with non-comparable payoffs, the actor defines a threshold of the resources available and tries to optimize the distribution of these resources over the desired payoffs. The spill-over strategy means that if the utility obtained from one game is above the minimal threshold, then this influences the utility obtained from the other game’s structure and implicitly its utility. This last aggregation procedure emphasizes the main difference between the individually isolated games in the standard game theoretical models and the nested game model, which lays in the interdependence of the individual games. In this way, the uncomparable payoffs become the stepping stone from game theoretical rationality to a type of bounded rationality.
Once these theoretical considerations are set, new questions may be raised regarding the methodological strategy that would provide data liable to provide answers to the theoretical questions. To answer this question, I first tired to see what type of endeavour my research was. Because I am trying to see HOW people make their decisions, this counts as a descriptive endeavour (Tsoukias, 2008). On the other hand, in decision-making process description, there are two types of behaviours which are observable: actions and words. Actions, i.e decisions, are only observable post-hoc. The details of the process of decision-making may be analysed from the individual’s discourse, again post-factum. The discoursive level is assumed to be the level at which the utilities from each of the games the player is involved in are aggregated. This does not mean that if the person does not verbalize the actions, there will be no aggregation of utilities, because it is possible that these utilities are aggregated in an inner discourse, in the form of thoughts. Therefore, two methods are amenable to such observations. The interview brings a detailed description of a person’s discourse on the decision-making process and the experiment, gives a potentially statistically significant account of actions.
To conclude this presentation, during the journey of my doctoral research, I realized that, unlike the text-book teaches us, there are several types of questions one needs to address during a research endeavour. The first type includes the well-known research question(s). A second type comes in the form of questions that help bridge some gaps in the researcher’s knowledge over some general field of research. This field of research may be related to a concept in the main research question or may be just a field that facilitates understanding, such as the understanding of theories or of methodological issues. These questions, generally remain unstated and their answers are not directly presented in the dissemination of the main research results, but they are crucial to understanding the topic and it’s implications. In my research, such a question was related to rational choice theory. As I had a general, but not thorough understanding of this theory, I had to make a literature review on this topic, in order to understand all it’s variants, historical contributions and un-answered questions. Other such questions were related to decision-making, game-theory, experiments in the social sciences and interviewing.
A third type of questions are aiding-questions. Questions that help understand the concepts in the main research question, but are not exactly addressing the main research question. The answer to such questions may appear as sub-sections of the paper or may be required to introduce the main topics. Nevertheless, the effort behind these question is only revealed partially in the text. For my project, these questions were related to rule-obedience, to the study of relationships and their measurement. A brief literature review was undertaken for each of these concepts.
Finally, the last type of questions that I found are probably more characteristic for theoretical research. These questions regard the possible applications and extensions of a theoretical model. My own experience showed that such questions can only be answered by being genuinly curious about and having access to literature in other fields than the immediate research interest.