Rational Choice and Unintended Consequences amid Social Crisis

Unintended consequences, which are derived from individuals’ rational behaviors, have constituted a classical and significant issue of rational choice theory. For instance, the issue of social dilemmas can be thought to exemplify unintended consequences targeted by rational choice theorists. Accordingly, unintended consequences might arise in ordinal situations as well as in extraordinal situations, such as natural and man-made disasters, as well as political, financial, and social crises. Evidently, we can include the COVID-19 pandemic in such extraordinal situations. For instance, many governments ordered city-wide lockdowns to protect citizens from the pandemic. Thus, citizens had to decide how to behave under such restrictions. In the absence of individual incentives to obey governmental orders regardless of public interests related to the prevention of the pandemic, their rational behaviors might obstruct the materialization of public interests. Then, we can consider this phenomenon as unintended collective consequences derived from the rational behaviors of individuals. Conversely, if individuals obey governmental orders by following public interests to shield themselves from the pandemic, their behaviors might engender serious economic stagnation in society. We can also count this as another unintended consequence. Thus, it is asserted that the social crisis embodied by the COVID-19 pandemic raises various issues in the field of rational choice theory.

In this session, the organizer hopes to collect presentations related to the issues of unintended consequences amid social crises. Both theoretical and empirical studies are welcome.