Demand–Governance Wedge
A concept in technology policy describing the systematic gap between what people privately demand from an emerging technology — measured by their willingness to adopt or pay for it — and how those same people want the technology governed at a societal level. The wedge exists when the attributes that drive private adoption differ from those that drive preferred regulation. 1
Core Finding
The demand–governance wedge was empirically characterized by Immordino, Macis, Marino, and Panebianco (2026) using a nationally representative US survey experiment (N=5,556) on human enhancement technologies (HET). Their key results:
- ~53% would adopt HET given the chance, but most adopters still favor strict regulation
- ~28% would never adopt at any benefit, driven overwhelmingly by the “enhancing” framing (vs. therapeutic/restorative) rather than by safety risk — consistent with a principled, non-compensatory constraint
- Most non-adopters do not wish to forbid others from adopting — they refuse personally but do not impose that choice on others
- Productivity enhancement generates the most ethical concern of any attribute but attracts the least regulation; respondents favor subsidizing over taxing adoption, consistent with concern about access inequality rather than safety
The central implication: private demand is an unreliable guide to the governance citizens actually want. Markets reveal willingness to adopt but not willingness to regulate.
Why the Wedge Matters
Standard economic logic assumes demand signals social acceptability: willingness to pay reveals how much people value a technology, and corrective policy prices any externality while letting the market handle the rest. The demand–governance wedge challenges this directly — people hold two sets of considerations about the same technology:
- Adoption considerations: personal costs and benefits (does it help me?)
- Governance considerations: societal costs and values (should society allow and regulate this, and how?)
These two sets can diverge systematically, especially for technologies with:
- Irreversibility and tail risks
- Distributional consequences across education and labor markets
- Social competition / arms-race dynamics
- Intergenerational spillovers from heritable interventions
- Limits to meaningful consent
Cross-Domain Connections
- institutionally-constrained-technology-adoption: The longbow puzzle is about rulers constraining adoption for internal security reasons; the demand–governance wedge is about citizens wanting to constrain governance even while adopting personally. Both challenge the assumption that technology diffusion reflects revealed social preference.
- cooperation-and-defection: The wedge is a collective action problem in disguise — individuals benefit privately from adoption while society bears the costs, and governance preferences reflect the collective interest
- paperclip-maximizer: AI safety debates are a specific instance of the demand–governance wedge: commercial demand for AI capabilities may diverge sharply from public preferences for AI governance and alignment
- norms: The wedge suggests that norm formation around new technologies cannot be inferred from market behavior alone; governance preferences may operate through a different channel than adoption choices
Methodological Note
The Immordino et al. study used a vignette-based conjoint experiment randomizing five attributes (benefit domain, mechanism, heritability, purpose, risk) to decompose what drives adoption vs. regulation preferences. This design allows them to quantify the divergence between the two sets of preferences, not just observe that both exist.