Role Models that Make You Unhappy: Light Paternalism, Social Learning and Welfare

Christian Cordes and Christian Schubert

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography

Abstract: Behavioral (e.g. consumption) patterns of boundedly rational agents can lead these agents into learning dynamics that appear to be “wasteful” in terms of well-being or welfare. Within settings displaying preference endogeneity, it is however still unclear how to conceptualize well-being. This paper contributes to the discussion by suggesting a formal model of preference learning that can inform the construction of alternative notions of dynamic well-being. Based on the assumption that interacting agents are subject to two biases that make them systematically prefer some cultural variants over others, a procedural notion of well-being can be developed, based on the idea that policy should identify and confine conditions that generate dynamic instability in preference trajectories.

Keywords: Social Learning; Preference Change; Welfare; Human Cognition; Consumer Behavior Length 33 pages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 D11 D63 D83 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://137.248.191.199/RePEc/esi/discussionpapers/2010-22.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server 137.248.191.199: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Related works:
Journal Article: Role models that make you unhappy: light paternalism, social learning, and welfare (2013)
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:esi:evopap:2010-22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography Deutschhausstrasse 10, 35032 Marburg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christoph Mengs ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).