The Effects of Social Pressure on Fundamental Choices: Indecisiveness and Deferral

2026-02-16

AI Summary

This study challenges the mainstream economic assumption of immediate and decisive individual choice by incorporating hesitation and delay induced by social pressure. It proposes a two-stage decision-making model: in the first stage, a “one-to-many ordering” generates a consideration set to capture hesitant behavior; in the second stage, social distance and anticipated future social standing are integrated into the utility function within a game-theoretic framework to analyze broader social consequences. By synthesizing non-standard preferences, consideration set theory, and measures of social distance, this work transcends the conventional utility-maximization paradigm and offers a novel theoretical framework for indecisive choice grounded in empirical insights from psychology and management. The analysis reveals that hesitation and delay can lead to social welfare losses, providing a new theoretical lens for understanding fundamental choice behavior under social pressure.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Decision/Utility Theory
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web

Abstract

In mainstream neoclassical economics, utility maximization is the only engine of individual action, and the other or the social, if it is modeled for decisions deemed fundamental, it is done as a tacit externality parameter affecting an agent's maximized payoff. And even when hitched to a social reference point, a fully decisive and immediate response is invariably assumed. In this paper, we propose a non-standard articulation of the trade-off between personal utility and social distance, one motivated by experimental evidence from psychology, management science, and economics. Our approach deconstructs non-recurrent consumer choice to two stages: a non-decisive first stage in which a binary relation, called one-many ordering, yields an interval, the consideration set, to which the deferred choice is confined; a decisive second stage in which the distance from the average social choice, and future social expectations, are taken into account in present utility. Finally, we embed this indecisive consumer in an exploratory game-theoretic setting, and show that indecisiveness and choice deferral may cause social loss.

Problem

• social pressure
• indecisiveness
• choice deferral
• fundamental choices
• consideration set

Innovation

• indecisiveness
• choice deferral
• one-many ordering
• consideration set
• social distance