Teschl
Publications
RésuméL’agent économique est souvent par définition considéré comme un pur égoïste. Plus encore, son utilité est définie sur ce qu’il consomme et elle est considérée comme monotone – ce que nous appelons être « égoïste ». Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à l’hypothèse selon laquelle le marché conduit les individus à être égoïstes. Nous avançons tout d’abord que la théorie économique n’est pas limitée à considérer des agents économiques égoïstes mais qui peuvent également faire des choix fondés sur d’autres motivations, par exemple des agents qui ont des préférences altruistes envers les autres. Dans une deuxième partie de cet article, nous discutons plusieurs expériences en économie qui traitent des conditions dans lesquelles les préférences altruistes peuvent se manifester. Dans ce contexte, nous discutons en particulier trois aspects: la concurrence, la complétude des contrats et la différence entre l’argent gagnée et l’argent inattendue (ou « windfall money »). Ces trois facteurs, sous des circonstances particulières, semblent contribuer à l’observation de comportements plus égoïstes. Nous concluons que le fait de gagner de l’argent par sa propre activité et la responsabilité jouent un rôle spécifique dans la prévalence des comportement égoistes.
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Empathy is a longstanding issue in economics, especially for welfare economics, but one which has faded from the scene in recent years. However, with the rise of neuroeconomics, there is now a renewed interest in this subject. Some economists have even gone so far as to suggest that neuroscientific experiments reveal heterogeneous empathy levels across individuals. If this were the case, this would be in line with economists' usual assumption of stable and given preferences and would greatly facilitate the study of prosocial behaviour with which empathy is often associated. After reviewing some neuroscientific psychological and neuroeconomic evidence on empathy, we will, however, criticize the notion of a given empathy distribution in the population by referring to recent experiments on a public goods game that suggest that, on the contrary, the degree of empathy that individuals exhibit is very much dependent on context and social interaction.
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Within the philosophical tradition of personal identity, Derek Parfit’s
(1986) puzzling cases are quite famous. He invents imaginary stories such
as a person
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In this paper, we consider the extension of the conception of the economic agent as a person who chooses particular actions in relation to his or her social identity. We do this in particular by analysing Akerlof and Kranton's recent models on 'economics and identity' (2000). Amartya Sen has over the years consistently pointed out that a person might have different reasons to choose, including not only those that increase a person's self-interested utility, however broadly this self might be defined. The question then is how should one assess a person's well-being if her choices are not based on the maximisation of her 'own' utility. Against the background of these considerations, we will present our own analysis of the economic agent's identity, which is motivated not by the self-interested choices, but by achieving consistency between one's characteristics and one's desired self-image through participation in different social groups. We propose to situate this identity-conception in a space of capabilities.
The Capability Approach (CA) as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has in part been a response to the problem of adaptive preferences. Their argument says that people might adapt to certain unfavorable circumstances and any self-evaluation in terms of satisfaction or happiness will in this case necessarily be distorted. To evaluate people's well-being in terms of functionings and capabilities guarantees a more objective picture of people's life. Next to this strong criticism on subjective measurements of well-being, we observe an increasing interest in Subjective Well-Being (SWB) or Happiness studies that are included in the broader field of Hedonic Psychology. In this paper, we thus revise the original critique of adaptive preferences and compare it with a more detailed analysis of adaptation as it is presented in hedonic psychology. It becomes clear that adaptation can be a positive as well as a negative phenomenon and that the adaptive preference critique had a particular narrow view on adaptation. However, this does not mean SWB-research is not any longer susceptible to this critique. An alternative way to assess people's subjective well-being, but which could be considered to be more in line with the CA, is proposed by Daniel Kahneman's Objective Happiness. These are all relatively new considerations, especially in economics. Therefore much more research needs to be done on the positive and negative aspects of adaptation to understand its consequences on well-being – especially when evaluated within the capability-space.
John B. Davis explores the question of what the economic individual is. He bases his considerations of orthodox economics on the assumption that these theories implicitly rely on a conception of the individual that has its origin in Locke’s idea of the self as subjective inwardness. Economic history then is the attempt to deal with Locke’s inherent problems that this view involved. If neoclassical economics still has aspects of human psychology, mainstream economics dropped the subjective concept of the individual out of their considerations. However, Davis demonstrates that even the neoclassical concept of the individual fails to pass the existence test of individual identity. The latter is an idea developed in analogy to philosophers’ concern about personal identity and examines if the individual can be distinguished among different individuals and if he or she can be reidentified as the selfsame individual through time. The failure of the theory of the individual in orthodox economics led Davis to develop a concept of a socially embedded individual in accordance with heterodox accounts of economics. He submits this conception to the same test of individual identity. It appears that the socially embedded individual can be said to hold an identity in specific circumstances.
