I don’t think that’s a good example. For the status-quo bias to be at work we need to have the case that we think it’s worse for people to have both less personal responsibility and more personal responsibility (i.e., the status-quo is a local optimum). I’m not sure anyone would argue that having more personal responsibility is bad, so the status-quo bias wouldn’t be in play and the preference reversal test wouldn’t apply. (A similar argument works for the current rate of heroin addiction not being a local optimum.)
I think the problem in the example is that it mixes the axes for our preferences for people to have personal responsibility and our preferences for people not to be addicted to heroin. So we have a space with at least these two dimensions. But I’ll claim that personal responsibility and heroin use are not orthagonal.
I think the real argument is in the coupling between personal responsibility and heroin addiction. Should we have more coupling or less coupling? The drug in this example would make for less coupling. So let’s do a preference reversal test and see if we had a drug that made your chances of heroin addiction more coupled to your personal responsiblity, would you take that? I think that would be a valid preference reversal test in this case if you think the current coupling is a local optimum.
I don’t think that’s a good example. For the status-quo bias to be at work we need to have the case that we think it’s worse for people to have both less personal responsibility and more personal responsibility (i.e., the status-quo is a local optimum). I’m not sure anyone would argue that having more personal responsibility is bad, so the status-quo bias wouldn’t be in play and the preference reversal test wouldn’t apply. (A similar argument works for the current rate of heroin addiction not being a local optimum.)
I think the problem in the example is that it mixes the axes for our preferences for people to have personal responsibility and our preferences for people not to be addicted to heroin. So we have a space with at least these two dimensions. But I’ll claim that personal responsibility and heroin use are not orthagonal.
I think the real argument is in the coupling between personal responsibility and heroin addiction. Should we have more coupling or less coupling? The drug in this example would make for less coupling. So let’s do a preference reversal test and see if we had a drug that made your chances of heroin addiction more coupled to your personal responsiblity, would you take that? I think that would be a valid preference reversal test in this case if you think the current coupling is a local optimum.