Model of Human Fallibility: Traveling Behavioral Assumptions in Public Governance
Perspectives on Public Management and Governance
Over the past decades, insights from behavioral sciences have gained traction as sources for desi... more Over the past decades, insights from behavioral sciences have gained traction as sources for designing public policy and for governing areas of collective concerns. It has become increasingly common to ascribe ‘flawed’ decision-making to systematic heuristics and cognitive biases of citizens and experts. This popular behavioral approach to public organizing is anchored in a very particular model of human behavior, namely what we label homo fallibilis or the model human fallibility. This model grew out of a critique of neoclassical economics’ homo economicus but ended as a new recipe for predicting and regulating human behavior. To conceptualize the model of human fallibility and to understand its ability to travel intellectually and empirically, we trace it historically to Simon’s bounded rationality, over Tversky and Kahneman’s systematic biases and to recent nudge literature. Next, we illustrate how and by what means the model travels into different areas of public service provisi...
Remaking the Elasticity of Consumer Wants: Integrating Wind Power in the Danish Electricity System by increasing the Price Elasticity of Retail Electricity
This project studies the making of a market for wind power in France. Markets for wind power are ... more This project studies the making of a market for wind power in France. Markets for wind power are often referred to as ‘political markets: On the one hand, wind power has the potential to reduce CO2-emissions and thus stall the effects of electricity generation on climate change; and on the other hand, as an economic good, wind power is said to suffer from (techno-economic) ‘disabilities', such as high costs, fluctuating and unpredictable generation, etc. Therefore, because of its performance as a good, it is argued that the survival of wind power in the market is premised on different instruments, some of which I will refer to as ‘prosthetic devices'. This thesis inquires into two such prosthetic devices: The feed-in tariff and the wind power development zones (ZDE) as they are negotiated and practiced in France, and also the ways in which they affect the making of markets for wind power. Theoretically, this dissertation mobilizes a constructivist approach according to which...
This article studies the work performed by technicians in a large demonstration project, EcoGrid ... more This article studies the work performed by technicians in a large demonstration project, EcoGrid 2.0, in the Danish island Bornholm. Based on observations of household visits conducted by technicians, we demonstrate how these act as 'middlemen', mediating and linking together the smart technology of the demonstration and the involved users. Formally, technicians' work is to keep users online; however, they also perform a number of invisible tasks to keep users engaged and active. Our ethnographic study shows two broad categories of invisible work: first, technicians continually facilitate the willingness of users, recurrently affirming the social contract between users and demonstration project. Second, technicians facilitate the abilities of users by improvising informal training sessions of how to operate the system. These findings are used to discuss the importance of invisible articulation work of technical service workers in large scale real-world experiments.
The organization of markets for collective concerns and their failures
Economy and Society
This special issue introduces a new object of analysis: the organization of markets for collectiv... more This special issue introduces a new object of analysis: the organization of markets for collective concerns and their failures. This paper discusses how the study of this new object challenges key assumptions in recent social studies of markets. We focus on three issues, each related to the keywords of the title: organization, market, and concern. The first problem is the fluctuating conceptual value of the market-organization pair in the forms of expertise used to implement and repair markets for collective concerns. The second challenge pushes social researchers to develop a stronger analytical sensibility to the identification and understanding of the concepts of markets mobilized in their fields. Third, we show how the consolidation of professions involved in practices of market design challenges the political expectations found in social studies of markets.
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Papers by Trine Pallesen