Freedom counts: Cross-country empirical evidence

João V. Ferreira, Nobuyuki Hanaki, Fabrice Le Lec, Erik Schokkaert and Benoît Tarroux

European Economic Review, 2025, vol. 176, issue C

Abstract: We investigate whether people attach intrinsic value to freedom and which theoretical rules they implicitly employ to evaluate opportunity sets. To do this, we run a new survey-based study with 4902 participants across 10 different countries. Participants face various comparisons of opportunity sets in a policy-relevant context in a “spectator” position. Our main result is that an overwhelming majority of spectators reveal that they attach intrinsic value to freedom. We also find that a large majority of participants use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries.

Keywords: Freedom of choice; Welfare; Intrinsic value; Opportunity set; Cross-cultural survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 D63 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:176:y:2025:i:c:s0014292125000728

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105022

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