A capabilitarian behavioral economics: what behavioral economics can learn from the capability approach

Pablo Garces-Velastegui ()
Additional contact information
Pablo Garces-Velastegui: Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Av. Amazonas and Villalengua

International Review of Economics, 2024, vol. 71, issue 3, No 12, 667-690

Abstract: Abstract Behavioral economics (BE) accounts for how people actually behave has proven to be very influential in multiple domains. Its insights have dislodged settled assumptions and put forward an improved understanding of human beings and their agency. Although it challenges the conventional approach, advanced by rational choice theory (RCT), because it also formally builds on it, BE shares some of RCT’s advantages as well as its shortcomings. One the one hand, it shares an important focus on freedom. On the other, it is limited to self-interest as the main motivation for human action. The latter is a limitation since human experience is much richer than that. To complement BE’s limitation, this paper suggests Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA). This framework places humans and their quality of life at the locus of attention for the assessment of social states. To do so, it challenges RCT in a more fundamental way and it provides a richer account of human agency, which includes both self-regarding as well as other-regarding motivations. This combination enriches BE’s realism as well as practicality.

Keywords: Agency; Altruism; Behavioral economics; Capability approach; Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D9 I3 O15 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12232-024-00457-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:inrvec:v:71:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s12232-024-00457-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cy/journal/12232/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-024-00457-8

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Economics is currently edited by Luigino Bruni

More articles in International Review of Economics from Springer, Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().