Varieties of paternalism and the heterogeneity of utility structures

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business.     

Relative risk aversion, relative prudence and comparative statics under uncertainty: The case of (μ, σ)‐preferences

From the expected‐utility approach, relative risk aversion being smaller than one and relative prudence being smaller than two emerge as preference restrictions that fully determine the optimal responses of decisions under uncertainty to certain shifts in probability distributions. We characterize the magnitudes of relative risk aversion and relative prudence in terms of the two‐parameter, mean‐standard deviation approach. We demonstrate that this characterization is instrumental in obtaining comparative static results in the two‐parameter setting. We further relate our findings to the results in the expected‐utility framework.     

Factors affecting households’ seafood purchasing decisions in Auckland,New Zealand: an empirical analysis

This paper uses the binary choice model to identify the factors that are significantly influencing the household purchase decisions of seafood products for home consumption in Auckland, New Zealand. It is found that ‘quality’ and ‘cooking easiness’ are the main product attributes that significantly influence households’ choices of seafood in Auckland. Also, the representative household has shown a strong preference for fresh and other alternative seafood products, including processed, smoked and canned, over frozen products. Retail outlets are found to be more attractive to the household purchasing seafood for home consumption. The New Zealand seafood industry may find this baseline study useful as a guide to developing future research structure on the domestic market.     

Does price reflect emotional,structural or performance quality?

Three denim jeans products from the same manufacturer with differentiated pricing and labels (antiqued, sandblasted, and stonewashed) were used to determine the relationship between price and quality. Both qualitative and quantitative procedures were used to analyse the garments. All three jeans were made of twill weave with 3 × 1 repeat. Both structural and performance characteristics were compared using standardized tests. Analysis of variance was used to compare the selected structural and performance characteristics among the three jeans products. Tukey’s HSD tests were used for post hoc multiple comparisons for three jeans. The findings revealed that despite the fact that all three jeans products were from the same store, and that the fabrics used the same weave, degree and direction of twist, the jeans differed significantly for several structural and performance characteristics. Several possibilities for future research were explored.     

Keeping Up with the Joneses and the Home Bias

We argue that when individuals care about their consumption relative to that of their neighbours, a home bias emerges, that is investors overweight domestic stocks in their portfolios. Domestic stocks are preferred because they also serve the objective of mimicking the economic fortunes and welfare of the investor's neighbours, countrymen, and social reference group. We also demonstrate that globalization mitigates the home bias, and derive a modified international CAPM.     

Food Choice in an Interdisciplinary Context

Reform of agricultural policies, notably the continuing elimination of production‐enhancing subsidies, makes it possible for policies to respond to social issues such as the rural environment and health in future. In this paper, we draw on a Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) research project which is examining the potential for the development of healthy food chains and the implications for human health and the environment. One of the key issues to be addressed is consumers’ willingness to pay for the nutritionally enhanced food products from these new chains, but it is evident that only a partial understanding can be gained from a traditional economics approach. In the paper, we discuss how economists are beginning to incorporate views from other disciplines into their models of consumer choice.     

Equilibria in large economies with a separable Banach commodity space and non-ordered preferences

The purpose of this paper is to provide an existence result of equilibria for economies with a measure space of agents, a non-trivial production sector and an infinite dimensional commodity space. The commodity space is modeled by an ordered separable Banach space whose positive cone has a non-empty interior. The discretization approach proposed in this paper, allows us to extend the existence results in Khan and Yannelis [Equilibrium in markets with a continuum of agents and commodities. In: Khan, M.A., Yannelis, N.C. (Eds.), Equilibrium Theory in Infinite Dimensional Spaces. Springer, Berlin, 1991] and Podczeck [Economic Theory 9 (1997) 585] to economies with a non-trivial production sector and with possibly non-ordered but convex preferences as well as partially ordered (possibly incomplete) but non-convex preferences.     

Stochastic Technology, Risk Preferences, and Adoption of Site-Specific Technologies

A model of farmer decision making is developed to determine the extent to which uncertainties about soil fertility and weather affect the value of site-specific technologies (SSTs) using jointly estimated risk and technology parameters. Uncertainty can lead risk-averse farmers to apply more fertilizers and generate more pollution than in the certainty case. Ignoring uncertainty and risk aversion would overestimate the economic and environmental benefits of SSTs and underestimate the subsidy required to induce adoption. Accounting for uncertainties and risk preferences might explain the low observed adoption rates of SSTs. Improving the accuracy of SSTs would increase the incentives for adoption.     

Nash implementation with an infinite-dimensional trade space

This paper deals with the problem of implementing the Walras correspondence via Nash equilibria, in exchange economies with infinitely many commodities and finitely many households with possibly non-ordered preferences. We explicitly construct a feasible mechanism enjoying some features, which have natural economic meanings. Under a fairly weak boundary condition, this game fully implements the Walras equilibria. If this condition is not fulfilled, our mechanism nevertheless implements the constrained Walras equilibria. Received: 11 December 2003, Accepted: 29 July 2005 JEL Classification: D41, D43, D51 We thank (without implicating) Prof. Jean-Marc Bonnisseau and Cuong Le Van for helpful comments. The views expressed in this paper reflect those of the authors and not necessarily those of Calyon.     

Preferences in the Future

Environmental economics has been much occupied with the discount rate, which is the value of future costs and benefits relative to present costsor benefits. But at least as important is the question of whatshould be discounted, that is, what the value of those future environmentalbenefits is to future generations. This paper analyzes the role for futurepreferences and discusses the state of knowledge. I argue that theappropriate discount rate is the market one, and that the real problemis determining future willingness-to-pay. This approach makes clearerthe connection between discounting and the valuation debate.This paper focuses on two features that have been prominent in that debate:existence value and reference dependence. I argue that thereis a vital connection between the two constructs and that this link yieldsimportant implications for future willingness-to-pay.