Governing the unknowns by action-space analyses

This paper focuses on the lack of knowledge often encountered, when attempting to explain the decisions of social actors. Rational choice assumptions often fail to give explanations due to unknown irrational motives behind the decisions of the studied actors. Similarly, incomplete information about the actors‘ situation may hinder social scientists to predict their decisions, even if they are completely rational.

Consequently, this paper proposes to accept the mentioned unpredictability and to focus on the explanation of the non-usage of other forms of behavior. Thus the behavior space is assumed to have „white“ spots, which are empty because actors do not stay there for a long time, and „black“ areas representing stable forms of behavior, which are thus occupied by many actors. The latter are in the following called „action-spaces“. An important task of sociology is to formulate hypotheses about the location of action-space-boundaries, which separate stable and unstable forms of behavior and are generally determined by the power and the interests of the concerned actors.

Boundaries of action-spaces can be estimated from empirical data by regression based statistical methods, which will briefly be presented in this paper. On the one hand, the mentioned hypotheses about the shape of action-spaces become this way testable. On the other hand, estimates of boundaries are also of practical use for feasibility studies. 

The proposed handling of unavailable knowledge is illustrated in this paper by a two-party competition for a scarce good, i.e. the gross domestic product of a country, which is distributed among different interest groups. The action-space analysis of the appropriate data yields upper and lower boundaries for income inequalities under different assumptions about the power distribution between employers and employees.