Opportunity and Preference Learning
Christian Schubert
Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography
Abstract:
Robert Sugden has recently elaborated upon the case for a normative standard of freedom as "opportunity" that is supposed to cope with the problem of how to realign normative economics - with its traditional rational choice orientation - with behavioral economics. His standard, though, presupposes that people respond to uncertainty about their own future preferences by dismissing any kind of self-commitment. We argue that the approach lacks psychological substance: Sugden's normative benchmark - the "responsible person" - is a purely artificial construct that can hardly serve as a convincing role model in a contractarian setting. An alternative concept is introduced, and some policy implications are briefly discussed.
Keywords: Opportunity Criterion; Preference Change; Reconciliation Problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D51 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2012-04-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
ftp://137.248.191.199/RePEc/esi/discussionpapers/2012-08.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server 137.248.191.199: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
Related works:
Journal Article: OPPORTUNITY AND PREFERENCE LEARNING (2015) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:evopap:2012-08
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography Deutschhausstrasse 10, 35032 Marburg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christoph Mengs (mengs@students.uni-marburg.de this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).