Noël Bonneuil
Institut national d’études démographiques and École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France
Abstract
The concept of congruence in the sense of affordance formulated by psychologist James J. Gibson between the intrinsic possibilities of objectives and the possibilities resulting from the characteristics and capabilities of the agent gives rise to an intersection problem between the set of states attainable from the agent and the capture basin of the objective. The agent however can only estimate these sets. The application to the co-emergence model of reinforcement in psychology offers to reconsider situations usually seen as resulting from a feedback loop in terms of controlled differential inclusion. It allows for assessing the effect of a treatment to which the patient may respond in a volatile way. The second application to empirical data of anticipated survival over a 15-year horizon shows the mismatch between actual and estimated congruence, with consequences for future consumption planning. A third case concerns time inconsistency in behavioral economics: The capture basin of the target reflecting an agent’s preference for a good at a given date over this increased good at a later date determines all the initial growth rates of the discount factor for which such a preference holds true. Congruence of a given initial growth rate with the target allows for identifying all trajectories that resolve time inconsistency from this growth rate. The formulation of congruence in terms of differential inclusions between agent and objective therefore makes it possible to develop on the original formulation of affordance in a context of non-normative behaviors.
Differ Equ Dyn Syst (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12591-025-00714-4