Behavioral Challenges in Practice When Dealing with Public Environmental Decision Problems

Public policy and environmental decisions are complex. They comprise high uncertainty and affect many people with different interests. Making trade-offs between achieving environmental and socio-economic objectives is inevitable. I highlight recent research and the many interesting opportunities for behavioral decision analysis, hereby including some literature from other fields. Following a typical Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) process, we start with problem structuring, specifically by identifying stakeholders, generating objectives and reducing these to a viable set, and generating alternatives. I only shortly cover making predictions, and focus on preference elicitation, which is especially prone to biases. I introduce preference construction and behavioral issues related to eliciting marginal value and utility functions, and weights. I also introduce online preference elicitation and gamification. For MCDA modeling, we should check that stakeholders agree with model assumptions. To deal with uncertainty in practice, I propose stepwise interactive sensitivity analyses. Throughout, I reference application examples and summarize research opportunities. We need to understand preference construction processes in order to elicit preferences efficiently in real-world decisions. This requires experimental and process research across cases. We still lack proven approaches that are easily applicable by practitioners and that meet high standards of academic rigor and consistency.