Improving institutional decision-making
How can we improve the effectiveness of institutions in solving important problems?
This profile is tailored towards students studying economics, history, philosophy, political sciences, psychology, sociology and maths, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Decisions made within institutions such as governments, charities and research organisations have a huge impact on the trajectory of many lives. Institutions influence major actions such as whether a country goes to war, what interventions are taken to alleviate poverty, what policies are adopted in the event of a pandemic and how countries coordinate on global risks such as climate change, biological weapons and artificial intelligence.
The Effective Institutions Project identifies two facets that determine the quality of an institution’s decision-making: how altruistically motivated their decisions are and their technical competence (see also this report). For example, an institution could be very good at achieving goals that don’t support the common good (high decision-quality, low value alignment). Alternatively, an institution could have highly altruistic goals but make decisions with negative consequences, for example due to some of the cognitive biases that psychology research has shown to affect human judgement (high value alignment, low decision-quality).
It could be valuable to do further research to increase both of these organisational characteristics (decision-quality, value-alignment). For example: what goals should an institution aiming to be altruistic adopt, how do we incentivise institutions to adopt more altruistic goals, and how do we help institutions achieve these goals?
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Contributors: This profile was last updated 5/1/2023. Thanks to Michael Noetel, Sophia Brown and Jam Kraprayoon for helpful feedback on this profile. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
