BEYOND THE ZERO-SUM: Endogenous Attention Allocation and Social Welfare

Abstract

Attention in standard economics has been paid to the questions of preferences within a given domain, treating the choice of domain as peripheral. What if the act of choosing what to pay attention to, however, is the primary mechanism through which welfare might be maximized? This thesis proposes a formal model of endogenous attention allocation across dimensions of social comparison, subject to conformity pressure. Agent-based simulations reveal two independent structural levers that improve welfare while avoiding the costly zero-sum competition for objective rank: expanding the arenas in which people can hold genuine standing, and more powerfully, protecting local communities within which that standing is recognized. These findings make a direct case for treating attention allocation as the first-order object of welfare analysis, thereby identifying structural conditions of preference formation as instruments of social design.