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

Gerardo Infante (1) , Guilhem Lecouteux (2) , Robert Sugden (1)

1 UEA - University of East Anglia [Norwich]
2 X-DEP-ECO - Département d'Économie de l'École Polytechnique

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.

Mots clés: preference purification; inner rational agent; behavioural welfare economics; libertarian paternalism; context-dependent preferences

Domaines: Economies et finances

Gerardo Infante, Guilhem Lecouteux, Robert Sugden. Preference purification and the inner rational agent: a critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics. Journal of Economic Methodology, 2016, 23 (1), pp.1-25. ⟨10.1080/1350178X.2015.1070527⟩. ⟨halshs-01427046⟩