040186 UK Individual Choice and Welfare (2012S)

This course will look at individual choice behavior in

more detail. We will look at the theory of individual choice and try to

understand the conceptual challenges that come along with it. What person

does this approach represent? What behavior is highlighted? We will in

particular study the discussion around the meaning of self-interest,

whether the person is self-interested in a purely egoistic sense or

whether he or she can be self-interested in a large sense which also

includes other-regarding behavior. This will also have important

consequences on what we mean by welfare for a person. In particular, the

question is what we can say about the welfare of a person if she is not

acting in her self-interest. The thread of this course is that whilst in

recent years, there has been a growing research focus on which "interest"

a person may have (exemplified by the huge increase in

experimental/behavioral literature at which we will also look), what has

not been done is to define what "self" means in self-interest. So what is

it? Said differently, what is the identity of the economic agent? We will

try to respond to these questions by looking at a number of articles and

experiments and to understand their meaning for the conception of the

individual and his or her welfare.