Behavioural welfare analysis and revealed preference: Theory and experimental evidence

Daniele Caliari

Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Abstract: Behavioural welfare economics provides tools to elicit welfare preferences when individuals use nonstandard behavioural models. Current proposals either require assumptions on the models or elicit preferences that become coarser and coarser as the dataset grows. We propose an informational property [Informational Responsiveness] that solves the coarseness problem and, as the dataset grows, characterizes the family of welfare preference elicitation tools that elicit the underlying utility function of a broad family of stochastic models, denoted as preference monotonic models. As such, we argue that Informational Responsiveness is an important property of preference elicitation tools. We then test our property in an experiment in which participants first face a sequence of questions regarding time and risk outcomes and second report their preferences over a subset of the alternatives. We find that preference elicitation tools that satisfy our requirement provide a significantly better match between the elicited and the reported welfare relation.

Keywords: Behavioural Welfare economics; Bounded rationality; Stochastic choice; Revealed preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D0 D6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/274073/1/1855317265.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:wzbeoc:spii2023303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change from WZB Berlin Social Science Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().