IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mpg/wpaper/2005_11.html

The Welfare Economics of Adaptive Preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Carl Christian von Weizsäcker

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany)

Abstract

In this paper I demonstrate that a reasonable welfare theoretic concept of "progress" can be made consistent with the assumption of endogenously changing preferences as long as these preference changes correspond to the pattern of "adaptive preferences". The main theorem of the paper shows that under certain additional conditions "adaptive preferences" imply the existence of a complete pre-ordering of the consumption space in terms of "improvement paths" which allow endogenous preference changes. It is then shown that welfare economics of "improvement paths" is also possible with interpersonal influences on preferences. A conjecture is developed that results of recent empirical and experimental research into human economic behaviour corroborate the hypothesis of "adaptive preferences".

Suggested Citation

  • Carl Christian von Weizsäcker, 2005. "The Welfare Economics of Adaptive Preferences," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics 2005_11, Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2005_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2005_11online.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fehr, Ernst & Schmidt, Klaus M., 2001. "Theories of Fairness and Reciprocity," Discussion Papers in Economics 14, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vanberg Viktor J., 2014. "Evolving Preferences and Welfare Economics: The Perspective of Constitutional Political Economy," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 234(2-3), pages 328-349, April.
    2. Linus Mattauch & Cameron Hepburn & Nicholas Stern, 2018. "Pigou Pushes Preferences: Decarbonisation and Endogenous Values," CESifo Working Paper Series 7404, CESifo.
    3. Paul Anand & Laurence S. J. Roope & Anthony J. Culyer & Ron Smith, 2020. "Disability and multidimensional quality of life: A capability approach to health status assessment," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(7), pages 748-765, July.
    4. Mattauch, Linus & Hepburn, Cameron, 2016. "Climate policy when preferences are endogenous – and sometimes they are," INET Oxford Working Papers 2016-04, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Carlo Borzaga & Ermanno Tortia, 2004. "Worker involvement in entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations. Toward a new assessment of workers' perceived satisfaction and fairness," Department of Economics Working Papers 0409, Department of Economics, University of Trento, Italia.
    2. Corneo, Giacomo & Fong, Christina M., 2008. "What's the monetary value of distributive justice," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(1-2), pages 289-308, February.
    3. Omar Al-Ubaydli & John List, 2016. "Field Experiments in Markets," Artefactual Field Experiments j0002, The Field Experiments Website.
    4. Schmitz, Patrick W. & Hoppe-Fischer, Eva, 2009. "Gathering Information before Signing a Contract: Experimental Evidence," CEPR Discussion Papers 7252, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Stephan Meier & Alois Stutzer, 2008. "Is Volunteering Rewarding in Itself?," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 75(297), pages 39-59, February.
    6. Fehr, Ernst & Falk, Armin, 2002. "Psychological foundations of incentives," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(4-5), pages 687-724, May.
    7. Marianna Baggio & Luigi Mittone, 2016. "Experience and History: An Experimental Approach to Generational Heterogeneity," International Journal of Applied Behavioral Economics (IJABE), IGI Global Scientific Publishing, vol. 5(4), pages 1-23, October.
    8. Cabrales, Antonio & Miniaci, Raffaele & Piovesan, Marco & Ponti, Giovanni, 2007. "An experiment on markets and contracts : do social preferences determine corporate culture?," UC3M Working papers. Economics we072010, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    9. Alesina, Alberto & Angeletos, George-Marios, 2005. "Corruption, inequality, and fairness," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(7), pages 1227-1244, October.
    10. Silvia Sacchetti, 2015. "Inclusive and Exclusive Social Preferences: A Deweyan Framework to Explain Governance Heterogeneity," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 126(3), pages 473-485, February.
    11. Dominique Demougin & Claude Fluet & Carsten Helm, 2006. "Output and wages with inequality averse agents," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 39(2), pages 399-413, May.
    12. Velez, Rodrigo A., 2017. "Inequity-averse preferences in general equilibrium," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 166-175.
    13. Jing Zhao & Zhijie Zou & Jianfei Chen & Yujia Chen & Wanfa Lin & Xianbo Pei & Enjing Li & Yajing Dong & Xiaoli Chen, 2024. "Offline social capital, online social capital, and fertility intentions: evidence from China," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-13, December.
    14. Lorenzo Sacconi, 2007. "A Social Contract Account for CSR as an Extended Model of Corporate Governance (II): Compliance, Reputation and Reciprocity," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 75(1), pages 77-96, September.
    15. Ashraf, Nava & Bohnet, Iris & Piankov, Nikita, 2003. "Is Trust a Bad Investment?," Working Paper Series rwp03-047, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    16. Gallenstein, Richard, 2020. "Biased Fairness Views and Internal constraints to risk-sharing: A lab-in-the-field analysis in Ghana," 2020 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, Kansas City, Missouri 304236, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    17. Oindrila Dey & Swapnendu Banerjee, 2022. "Incentives, Status and Thereafter: A Critical Survey," South Asian Journal of Macroeconomics and Public Finance, , vol. 11(1), pages 95-115, June.
    18. d'Adda, Giovanna, 2011. "Social Status and Influence: Evidence from an Artefactual Field Experiment on Local Public Good Provision," Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2011 22, Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics.
    19. Butz, Britta & Guillen Alvarez, Pablo & Harbring, Christine, 2021. "Incentives for Cooperation in Teams: Sociality Meets Decision Rights," IZA Discussion Papers 14242, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    20. Maria Montero, 2008. "Altruism, Spite and Competition in Bargaining Games," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 65(2), pages 125-151, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2005_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marc Martin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mppggde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.