Choice Group Seminar by Tobias Henschen (University of Cologne): ‘Majority voting on nudges’

Abstract: I review the debate revolving around the two criticisms that Sugden directs against behavioral welfare economics in The Community of Advantage. What the debate seems to bring to light is that the evidence that behavioral welfare economists can provide in support of relations of token-level causation between individual choices and welfare levels is weak. They interpret this evidence in terms of evidence in support of mistakes, and they approximate evidence of mistakes by providing evidence in support of reasoning imperfections. One likely result is that the false positive rate of identifying mistakes is high among paternalists and low among anti-paternalists. I investigate whether the quality of the evidence improves in the hypothetical case in which individuals vote on the implementation of nudges.

Tobias Henschen is a principal investigator at a DFG-funded research project on the philosophy of complexity economics.

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