040377 UK Individual Choice and Welfare (2011S)

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.