Evaluating opportunities when more is less

Yukinori Iwata ()
Additional contact information
Yukinori Iwata: Nishogakusha University

Theory and Decision, 2023, vol. 95, issue 1, No 6, 109-130

Abstract: Abstract There exists psychological evidence that consumers do not consider all available items in the market, which can lead to the “more-is-less” effect, a phenomenon where having more options causes a welfare reduction (Llears et al. in J Econ Theory 170:70–85, 2017). Under this more-is-less effect, we face a dilemma that adding new opportunities may both improve and worsen individual well-being. This study proposes a hypothesis that “more is always better,” which implies that adding new opportunities cannot worsen individual well-being, is a bias to which moral heuristics leads. A satisfactory resolution of this dilemma is act-consequentialism over menus, which is an ex-post and third-party evaluation of opportunity sets. We provide an axiomatic foundation for act-consequentialism over menus and apply it to policymakers’ menu-providing policies.

Keywords: Opportunity set; More is less; Weak set monotonicity; Moral heuristics; Act-consequentialism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11238-022-09914-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:theord:v:95:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s11238-022-09914-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/11238/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11238-022-09914-8

Access Statistics for this article

Theory and Decision is currently edited by Mohammed Abdellaoui

More articles in Theory and Decision from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().