The Curse of Intangibility: Why Prevention Policies Fail

with Todd Cherry

Work in Progress

This paper introduces “intangibility” as a distinct behavioral phenomenon that explains chronic underinvestment in prevention policies across domains, including wildfire management, vaccination, and climate mitigation. The authors argue that outcomes are intangible when they cannot be directly observed, cannot be distinguished from noise, or cannot be attributed to specific causes—a problem fundamentally different from well-studied biases like time discounting, ambiguity aversion, or probability neglect. Using examples from the 2025 Los Angeles fires and declining vaccination rates, they demonstrate how prevention policies face an asymmetric accountability structure: success produces invisible non-events that generate no political credit, while failure remains highly visible and generates blame. The paper proposes a two-dimensional framework characterizing intangibility along observability and attributability axes, predicting that policies in the high-intangibility corner (prevention, maintenance, long-term investments) will face systematic underinvestment regardless of their cost-effectiveness. The authors call for experimental research to understand intangibility’s behavioral underpinnings and suggest structural reforms—including dedicated prevention budgets and long-term accountability metrics—to offset this bias.