Preference purification and the inner rational agent: a critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics

By Gerardo Infante, Guilhem Lecouteux, Robert Sugden. 2016

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2509a7d0df990181ff834ad393fd77706b815450

Citations in the corpus

• A Review of Nudges: Definitions, Justifications, Effectiveness (2020, unknown): “In the first place, the decision-maker may not have “true” preferences at all (Infante et al., 2016; Rizzo & Whitman, 2019; Sugden, 2018). As Infante et al. (2016) and Sugden (2018) argue, the idea of decision-makers having “true” preferences presupposes a model of decision making where an “inner ra”