DMUU: Understanding and Improving Environmental Decisions

关于“绿色发电”的决定是由能源消费者（他们可能选择支付额外费用）和能源供应商（他们可能选择开发绿色电力并向消费者提供）共同做出的。消费者和供应商的社会和环境目标在其中发挥了重要作用，对他人选择绿色能源的社会期望也发挥了重要作用。环境决策研究中心（Center for research on Environmental Decisions）这个合作小组将开展跨学科研究项目，重点关注群体决策背后的社会过程（例如，开发或提供绿色选择的决定），以及个人或家庭决策背后的过程（例如，在不同能源计划之间的选择）。最近关于决策制定的研究强调了决策架构的重要性——决策设置的特征影响了偏好的构建方式。例子包括结果是否被定义为收益或损失，哪些选项被指定为默认选项，以及设置中隐含的时间范围。研究人员将探讨决策架构如何影响环境决策，特别是那些在社会背景下做出的决策，这些决策通常涉及不确定性、长时间范围和混合目标，包括社会目标。研究人员将通过进行实验室实验和实地研究，解决环境决策中的社会过程、决策架构和技术信息（包括气候变率和长期气候变化的预测）的使用问题，实地研究尤其侧重于对气候变化有有用的年-年和十年尺度预测以及这种变化对生计的重大影响的地区。这个合作小组的工作将加强对社会过程和决策架构的基本理解。它还将促进涉及长时间尺度、巨大不确定性和相互依赖性的复杂气候相关决策的决策设计；它将提供关于如何使用技术信息的新见解。它还将为现场的多个利益相关者提供实用的信息和见解，如水资源管理者、农业社区、保险公司和冰川消退附近的社区。该小组的工作还将为社会科学和自然科学研究的密切合作和整合提供新的视角。该合作小组项目由美国国家科学基金会社会、行为和经济科学理事会通过其不确定决策制定（DMUU）竞赛提供支持。

Decisions about "green electrical generation" are made both by energy consumers (who may choose to pay something extra) and by energy providers (who may choose to develop green power and to offer it to consumers). Social and environmental goals of both consumers and providers play an important role in this, as do social expectations about choices of green power by others. The interdisciplinary research program to be undertaken by this collaborative group, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, will focus on the social processes underlying group decisions (for example, the decision to develop or offer green options) as well as on processes underlying individual or household decisions (such as selection among different energy plans). Recent research on decision making has highlighted the importance of decision architecture -- the features of a decision setting that affect how preferences are constructed. Examples include whether outcomes are framed as gains or losses, what option is designated as default, and what temporal horizon is implied in the setting. The investigators will explore how decision architecture affects environmental decisions, especially those that are made in a social context and that usually involve uncertainty, long time horizon, and a mixture of goals, including social goals. The investigators will address social processes, decision architecture, and the use of technical information (including forecasts of climate variability and longer-term climate change) in environmental decision making by conducting laboratory experiments and field studies, the latter particularly focused on regions where there are useful year-to-year and decadal-scale forecasts of climate variation and significant impacts of this variation on livelihoods.This collaborative group's work will enhance basic understanding about social processes and decision architecture. It also will advance decision design for complex climate-related decisions that involve long time scales, great uncertainty, and interdependence; and it will provide new insights regarding how technical information is used. It also will provide practical information and insights for multiple stakeholders at field sites, such as water managers, farming communities, insurance companies, and communities near retreating glaciers. The group's work also will provide new perspectives about the close collaboration and integration of social and natural science research. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.