Political Auctions in the Scanner: Neural Mechanisms of WTP/WTA Framing for Controversial Policies

Participants evaluate controversial policies (e.g., climate mitigation fees, immigration quotas) under willingness-to-pay versus willingness-to-accept frames using a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism while undergoing fMRI. The study examines whether framing shifts absolute valuations, whether relative policy rankings remain stable, and which emotion-cognition networks mediate these effects. This research bridges applied economics, consumer neuroscience, and political communication by using incentive-compatible methods in neuroimaging to reveal how valuation frames alter political choice architecture at neural and behavioral levels. It tests whether consistent relative revealed preferences hold in political domains and maps findings to dual-process neural frameworks. Including identity-inconsistent primes allows exploration of interactions between identity activation and valuation frames. The promise lies in identifying stable versus malleable components of political preferences under different frames and their neural correlates, potentially resolving conflicting findings about framing robustness. The impact is a mechanistic account of when framing reorders political choices versus merely rescaling them, informing ethical persuasion, policy design, and the neuroscience of democratic decision-making.

References:

1. It’s all relative: consistent marginal effects with willingness to pay and willingness to accept framing in experimental auctions. Tongzhe Li, L. Paul, K. Messer, H. Kaiser (2023). Applied Economics.