Condorcet's jury theorem as a rational justification of soft paternalistic consumer policies

Malte Dold

No 2015-07, Discussion Paper Series from University of Freiburg, Wilfried Guth Endowed Chair for Constitutional Political Economy and Competition Policy

Abstract: The objective of this note is to revisit the meaningfulness of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) and apply it to the recent debate on liberal paternalism and consumer protection. The CJT con-sists of two parts, (a) stating that a jury of experts is always more competent than a single expert given a certain level of competence, and (b) asserting that for large juries, the collective com-petence approaches infallibility. This note argues that these insights suggest the application of a Condorcet jury voting procedure to the case of nudging boundedly rational consumers. The note proposes a simple calculus for finding an optimal jury size and advocates consumers' meta-preferences as the jury's evaluative dimension for designing soft paternalistic policies.

Keywords: Bounded Rationality; Condorcet Jury Theorem; Consumer Policy; Educative Nudges; Hierarchical Preferences; Knowledge Problem; Liberal Paternalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 D03 D63 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/125136/1/84411989X.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:wgspdp:201507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from University of Freiburg, Wilfried Guth Endowed Chair for Constitutional Political Economy and Competition Policy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().