Behavioural welfare economics with endogenous preferences for distributive justice

大量的实证文献发现，人们经常根据道德偏好做出选择，比如对平等、公平和诚实的偏好。道德偏好对福利分析提出了一个问题，因为它们被发现是政策变化的内生因素。政策可能会导致道德参与，人们形成道德偏好，但也会导致道德脱离，这种偏好受到抑制。这给福利分析带来了问题，因为许多用于评估政策的标准工具都假定了外生偏好。该项目旨在为行为福利经济学文献作出贡献，以寻求在标准工具不适用时可以使用的工具。它这样做是通过开发一个模型的个人决策，解决了三个问题：（1）在多大程度上观察到的选择代理人的基础上偏好的分配正义？(2)政策变化会在多大程度上导致这些偏好的变化？(3)我们如何评估政策，以考虑到这些偏好的内在性？开发的模型将研究一个代理人谁形成她的偏好后，支付不同程度的关注代理人的偏好，她认为道德相关。然后，政策可以被建模为能够影响这些不同层次的注意力。这种模式将是一种工具，可以用来评估政策的方式是敏感的内部偏好的分配正义。

A substantial empirical literature has found that people often make choices based on moral preferences, such as preferences for equality, fairness, and honesty. Moral preferences pose a problem for welfare analysis because they have been found to be endogenous to policy changes. Policies may induce moral engagement, where people form moral preferences, but also moral disengagement, where such preferences are suppressed. This poses a problem for welfare analysis because many of the standard tools used to evaluate policies assume exogenous preferences. This project seeks to contribute to the literature on behavioural welfare economics in its search for tools that may be used when standard tools are unsuitable. It does so by developing a model of individual decision making that addresses three questions: (1) to what extent are observed choices of an agent based on preferences for distributive justice? (2) to what extent would policy changes lead to changes in these preferences? (3) how may we evaluate policies in a way that takes the endogeneity of these preferences into account? The model developed will study an agent who forms her preferences after paying different levels of attention to the preferences of agents she finds morally relevant. Policies may then be modelled as being able to influence these different levels of attention. Such a model would be a tool that may be used to evaluate policies in a way that is sensitive to endogenous preferences for distributive justice.