Freedom Counts: Cross-Country Empirical Evidence

This paper investigates how people evaluate different sets of opportunities in terms of welfare and freedom of choice. To do this, we run a new survey-based study with 4,902 participants across 10 different countries, in which subjects face a series of theoretically-relevant binary comparisons of opportunity sets. Our analysis proceeds in two stages. We first use a naive Bayesian method to classify subjects according to the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to compare sets in terms of freedom and welfare. Then, we investigate whether subjects value freedom of choice even if more freedom does not lead to the choice of a better alternative (in- trinsic value of freedom of choice). Our main result is that an overwhelming majority of subjects reveal attaching intrinsic value to freedom. We also find that a large ma- jority of subjects use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the theoretical rules they employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries. All this suggests that it is important to offer choice to individuals in the design of organizations and public policies, even if this does not substantially change their choice behavior.