Welfare Economics in Large Worlds: Welfare and Public Policies in an Uncertain Environment

Guilhem Lecouteux

No 2020-08, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: The aim of this paper is first to review the different conceptions of welfare advanced in the literature on behavioural welfare economics. I then argue that Savage’s distinction between small and large worlds offers the adequate framework to conceptualise the problem of inferring a notion of welfare from possibly incoherent individual choices. I distinguish between welfarist, behaviourist, constitutional, and procedural approaches to the reconciliation problem, and show that they offer complementary solutions depending on the nature of the uncertainty of the choice problem, and on the epistemic position of the theoretician with respect to the agent we intend to model.

Keywords: reconciliation problem; nudge; boost; large worlds; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 B40 D01 D63 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-mic, nep-ore and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://195.220.190.85/GREDEG-WP-2020-08.pdf First version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Welfare economics in large worlds: welfare and public policies in an uncertain environment (2021)
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:gre:wpaper:2020-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patrice Bougette ().