This volume provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare, but also to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural substrates of moral cognition in health resource allocation decision problems. In particular, it investigated the cognitive and emotional processes that underpin utilitarian approaches to health care rationing such as Quality Adjusted Life Years. Participants viewed hypothetical medical and nonmedical resource allocation scenarios which described equal or unequal allocation of resources to different groups. In addition, participants were assigned to 1 of 2 treatments in which they either did or did not receive advanced (...) instructions about the principles of utilitarianism. In all cases, participants were asked to judged the proposed allocations as “fair” or “unfair.” More brain activity was observed within the superior parietal lobe, angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and bilateral caudate nucleus when participants viewed scenarios depicting equal divisions of resources. Conversely, unequal resource divisions were associated with more activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and insula cortex. Furthermore, instructions about the principles of utilitarianism led to significant activation differences within the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus. Significant differences in activity were also found within the inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula between medical and nonmedical scenarios. The implications for cognitive control mechanisms and the cognitive and neural bases of utilitarian ethical judgment are discussed. (shrink)

“Radical The paper provides a survey of arguments for claims that rational agents should have transitive preferences and argues that they are not valid. The presentation is based on a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Rational and Social Choice.

This article seeks to provide a characterization of theory prevalent in economics and found in many areas of social and natural science, particularly those that make increasing use of rational choice perspectives. Four kinds of theoretical project are identified in which empirical evidence plays a relatively small role in theory acceptance. The paper associates the minor role of evidence in theory formation and acceptance to a need to answer counterfactual questions and argues that is not necessarily incompatible with accounts of (...) science that emphasise truth in the development of theory. However, this view of economics does highlight factors that play a central role in theory acceptance which have not featured very strongly, if at all, in the philosophy of science literature. The article goes on to discuss four areas of economics that illustrate the consequences of using theory acceptance procedures which give relatively little weight to empirical testing. Benefits and costs of counterfactual science as it has developed in economics are discussed. It is concluded that there are good reasons why scientists may not use evidence in theory acceptance, even if an unintended consequence has been to strip economics of valuable empirical sensibilities still evident in natural sciences. (shrink)

The book offers a novel account of human happiness suitable for the general or popular science reader. Drawing on evidence from psychology and economics, as well as recent thinking in ethics, Happiness Explained addresses two of the most important questions to humankind, namely, what is happiness and how can we take account of this in our everyday lives? The book starts by setting out what is wrong with focussing exclusively on gross national income as a measure of wellbeing and introduces (...) a novel approach developed by Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen. It then considers evidence relating to different aspects of wellbeing from a wide range of economics and psychological studies. It also examines issues of fairness and wellbeing, the emergence of policies and practice around the world that seek to account for human wellbeing explicitly, and the principles that underpin wellbeing over the life course. (shrink)

Offers a response to one of the oldest questions known to humankind namely, what is happiness and how can we ensure that communities are flourishing, happy places for people to live and work?

The paper argues against the polarisation of the health economics literature into pro- and anti-QALY camps. In particular, we suggest that a crucial distinction should be made between the QALY measure as a metric of health, and QALY maximisation as an applied social choice rule. We argue against the rule but for the measure and that the appropriate conceptualisation of health-care rationing decisions should see the main task as the integration of competing and possibly incommensurable normative claim types. We identify (...) the main types as consequences, rights, social contracts, individual votes and community values and note situations in which the contribution of each claim type is limited. We go on to show that the integration of (at least some of) these claim types can be formalised within the mathematical framework provided by non-linear programming. (shrink)

In the context of multidimensional measures of well-being, a key question for policy is whether particular groups have differing priorities and are therefore likely to react differently to given economic or social shocks. We explore this issue by presenting the results of two related analyses that suggest positive answers on both counts. First, we apply reference class weights to unique data on adult capabilities in the UK and show that relative weights vary across some groupings. Furthermore, in some cases, deprivation (...) rankings of groups vary depending on which weights are used. Second, we explore possible behavioural consequences of different weights by examining the extent to which groups respond differently to three economic and social shocks (unemployment, widowhood and ill health). In this case, we find that weights and responses vary noticeably with age and region and sometimes with gender. We conclude that whilst equal weighting may be practically unavoidable when constructing indices of welfare in the absence of information on weights, their estimation from survey or experimental data is likely to be justified and may change views about policy needs or efficacy. (shrink)