Works
- A Mechanism for Selecting Public Goods When Preferences Must Be Elicited (with Aanund Hylland), unpublished discussion paper, 1980
- Status Quo Bias in Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1988
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Status quo bias. In a series of decision experiments, people chose an option disproportionately often when it was framed as the status quo, and field data on faculty choices of health plans and retirement programs showed the same pattern. The authors attribute the bias to transition costs, loss aversion, and psychological commitment to past choices, among other causes. Caveat: A preregistered replication (Xiao, Lam, Piara, and Feldman, Meta-Psychology, 2021) found strong support in three of the four original scenarios it retested and little support in the fourth.
What it explains
Zeckhauser and Samuelson explain why the existing arrangement wins ties and many contests it should lose: framing an option as the current state makes it more likely to be kept. Whoever can define what the status quo is gains an advantage before any debate begins.
Tactics that draw on Richard Zeckhauser (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A Harvard Kennedy School economist known for work on decisions under uncertainty and status quo bias, he and Aanund Hylland gave an incentive argument for making the cost of votes rise with the square of the number cast, and proposed a procedure for choosing public goods on that basis. E. Glen Weyl later built quadratic voting on their rationale.
Caveat: Lalley and Weyl credit Groves and Ledyard (1977) with first suggesting quadratic pricing for collective decisions; Hylland and Zeckhauser were the first to justify it uniquely.