Behavioural economics has taught us that human agents don't always display consistent, context-independent and stable preferences in their choice behaviour. Can we nevertheless do welfare economics...

Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human (...) being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic. (shrink)

Starting from a behavioural-economics critique of standard rational choice theory Sugden seeks to restate the case for classical liberalism. That case has three strands: a refutation of libertarian...

What should be the ‘informational base’ of welfare economics if one takes the insights from behavioral economics seriously? Sugden proposes individuals’ sets of opportunities. This paper discusses...

In philosophy, economics, and law, the idea of voluntary agreements plays a central role. But contractarianism in political philosophy stands on altogether different grounds from enthusi...

In The Community of Advantage, Robert Sugden reconstructs and defends an account of the liberal tradition in normative economics in the light of the findings of Behavioural Economics. In...