Tastes, Castes, and Culture: The Influence of Society on Preferences

By Ernst Fehr, K. Hoff. Social Science Research Network, 2011

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here, we argue that the opposition to explaining behavioural changes in terms of preference changes is ill-founded, that the psychological properties of preferences render them susceptible to direct social influences and that the impact of ‘society’ on preferences is likely to have important economic and social consequences.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef2a43267ffbd67d8f02b2f72d80381f950499d5

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Citations in the corpus

Consumer food stockpiling behavior and willingness to pay for food reserves in COVID-19 (2020, background): “2019), as revealed in the literature on the endogenous formation of individual preferences that these preferences are not constant across time and change under some circumstances (Fehr and Hoff 2011; Chuang and Schechter 2015; Yusuke and Yasuyuki 2019).”
Parental background and other-regarding preferences in children (2014, background): “Second, research has identified differences in preferences for fairness among adults across societies or even across groups within a society (for related surveys see Fehr and Hoff 2011 or Henrich et al. 2010).”
The Future in Mind: Aspirations and Forward-Looking Behaviour in Rural Ethiopia (2014, background): “The conceptualisations of aspirations in the academic literature largely share this everyday understanding of the concept.”
On Norms and Agency: Conversations about Gender Equality with Women and Men in 20 Countries (2013, background): “…to act, and their voices are dependent on both the opportunities and constraints typifying the societies they live in. Women’s preferences are not independent of the social and material environment they inhabit; they are contingent on it, as economists increasingly recognize (Fehr and Hoff 2011).”
Consequences of forced migration: A survey of recent findings (2019, result): “…where past experiences affect shadow prices and thereby choices, but we will for simplicity refer to preference shifts, in line with the vast literature on endogenous preferences (e.g. the survey by Bowles, 1998) and consistent with the insights of behavioural economics (see Fehr and Hoff, 2011).”
One swallow doesn’t make a summer: new evidence on anchoring effects (2014, background): “The literature has broadly concurred:5 Fehr and Hoff (2011) interpret the ALP results as “striking” evidence that preferences arereference-dependent, and suggest that a person might have multiple preferenc orderings, depending on the “social identity” invoked at the moment of a choice.”