Building H #63: What You Really, Really Want

So much of our economy is based on the challenge of figuring out what consumers want and then delivering the products and services that meet those demands. But how do we know what people want? The move to e-commerce and digital experiences brought a revolution in the way that businesses can answer this question: tracking actual consumer behavior through digital traces became very precise. You could watch what consumers actually did (their revealed preferences, in the language of economics) and then optimize the service to align with this behavior.

But this approach assumes that the way people behave in online environments is how they want to behave, an assumption questioned in a new paper by Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan and Manish Raghavan. The three authors propose a model for understanding user behavior and interpreting it in the context of user preferences. They note two flaws in the assumption that “engagement” is synonymous with utility. First, people have inconsistent preferences. One might, for example, want to limit one’s daily time spent on Instagram, but at the moment of scrolling through the feed, it’s hard to stop. So overconsumption can result from the mindless continuation of activity. The second flaw is that sometimes time spent engaging in an activity is the result of a service not satisfying one’s need. Following link after link of Google search results might be a case of each link not having the information that the user is seeking – not that the user really values clicking search result links. The authors offer a model, based on these insights, for how to think differently about user engagement and the question of what to optimize.

Thinking differently about what to optimize can create opportunities to design services to be healthier, given that optimizing for more engagement or more consumption often leads to unhealthy behavior (e.g. more food, more television, more scrolling through feeds at bedtime). One of the key opportunities we identified in the Building H Index 2022 report was for businesses to stop pushing excess consumption and show more respect for users’ actual preferences. The insights in this paper offer an opportunity to do just that.

In Building H news, we’ve just released another write-up in our series A Survey of Modern Life, which covers findings from consumer surveys of different health behaviors and the ways that different products and services can influence them. The new write-up covers the topic of exposure to the outdoors, looking at how time Americans spend outdoors each day (an hour or less for most people), the disparities across different populations (women spend less time outdoors than men, for example) and whether people think they get enough outdoor time in their lives.

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