Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge*

Hausman, Daniel M.; Welch, Brynn F.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2009.00351.x

Cited by 562 publications

(462 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

414

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…His reservations about nudging, presented in a jointly authored paper (Hausman & Welch, 2010; henceforth 'HW'), throw light on the model of agency that underlies his analysis of preference purification.…”

Section: The Inner Rational Agentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We will explain the preference purification approach that behavioural welfare economists have used to try to resolve these problems (Section 2) and consider Hausman's endorsement of this approach (Section 3). Drawing on Hausman and Welch's (2010) attempt to define a concept of autonomy that is appropriate for behavioural agents, we will explain the sense in which the preference purification approach presupposes the model of the inner rational agent (Section 4). We will argue that the idea that context-dependent choices are caused by errors of reasoning is fundamentally misconceived (Section 5).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Infante

Lecouteux

Sugden

2016

Journal of Economic Methodology

145

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

International audienceNeoclassical 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

show abstract

Section: The Inner Rational Agentmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Infante

Lecouteux

Sugden

2016

Journal of Economic Methodology

145

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…61 In other words, it can be argued that -despite people being formally permitted to opt out of paternalist choice architectures -there is a danger that nudging, rather than working with transparent regulations, involves the manipulation of individual choices. Addressing the issue to the individual herself instead of a paternalist planner would alleviate this problem: The individual's own capacity to deal with choice inconsistencies 61 See, e.g., Hausman & Welch (2010), Rebonato (2012). would be strengthened, which may be preferable to being the object of inconspicuous manipulation. (Sugden 2011;Dalton & Ghosal 2011).…”

Section: Libertarian Paternalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral political economy: A survey

Schnellenbach

Schubert

2015

European Journal of Political Economy

123

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Explaining individual behavior in politics should rely on the same motivational assumptions as explaining behavior in the market: That's what Political Economy, understood as the application of economics to the study of political processes, is all about. In its standard variant, those who played the game of politics should also be considered rational and selfinterested, unlike the benevolent despot of earlier models. History repeats itself with the rise of behavioral economics: Assuming cognitive biases to be present in the market, but not in politics, behavioral economists often call for government to intervene in a "benevolent" way. Recently, however, political economists have started to apply behavioral economics insights to the study of political processes, thereby re-establishing a unified methodology. This paper surveys the current state of the emerging field of "Behavioral Political Economy" and considers the scope for further research. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: D780, D030, A120, D720.

show abstract

“…Hausman recognises the 'irony' in behavioural economists' appeal to inner rational agents, but he finds our arguments unclear or unconvincing except insofar as they reduce to the familiar 'epistemological' and 3 'normative' objections to BWE (as presented, for example, by Hausman and Welch, 2010).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘On the Econ within’: a reply to Daniel Hausman

Infante

Lecouteux

Sugden

2016

Journal of Economic Methodology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Our paper is a critique of an approach to normative economics -'behavioural welfare economics', or BWE for short -which is advocated by many prominent behavioural economists. Daniel Hausman features in our argument as (in his words) an alleged philosophical fellow-traveller. Having written the paper in the hope of sparking off a debate about how behavioural economics should deal with normative questions, we are pleased that he has responded with a defence of some of the features of BWE that we criticised.If we have read Hausman's comment correctly, he does not disagree with our characterisation of what BWE is, or with our attribution of this approach to behavioural economists. In relation to our critique, the main features of BWE can be summarised as follows: (1) The approach is intended to apply to cases in which individuals' revealed preferences depend on contextual factors that have little or no apparent relevance to those individuals' interests or well-being. (2) The normative criterion is the satisfaction of each individual's latent (or 'purified') preferences, defined as the preferences she would reveal in the absence of any errors that might be caused by limitations of attention, information, cognitive ability or self-control. (3) Latent preferences are interpreted as expressing individuals' subjective judgements about their interests or well-being; they do not necessarily track objective properties of the external world (such as an individual's monetary wealth or health status) or properties of passive experience (such as happiness in the hedonic sense).(4) In the cases to which BWE is to be applied, latent preferences are assumed to be contextindependent.In saying that BWE implicitly uses a model of an inner rational agent, we mean no more than that it has properties (1) to (4). Of course, behavioural economists do not maintain that a human being is really made up of a neoclassically rational entity encased in an errorprone psychological shell. But we think it is both true and illuminating that BWE proceeds as if human beings were like that. BWE invokes a model of rational agency when it assumes that, in the absence of error, an individual's choices would reveal coherent preferences. This

show abstract

Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge*

Cited by 562 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Behavioral political economy: A survey

‘On the Econ within’: a reply to Daniel Hausman

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About