Advances in Ethical and SOcial Preferences – AESOP

It is now widely recognized that consideration for others plays a major role in many economic decisions. Indeed, economic analysis has developed behavioral models of social preferences that have explained, with relative success, many stylized facts. However, these models suffer from two significant blind spots. First, they primarily focus on consequentialist considerations and do not make room for procedural or deontological concerns. Second, they remain relatively silent on several critical dimensions of social decisions, such as the role of uncertainty and time, as well as autonomy and freedom. The issue is important because when these characteristics are present, the link between actions and consequences is looser than in the consequentialist framework. The AESOP project seeks to address these two issues by theoretically exploring and experimentally testing the question of social preferences when deontological motives are present, as well as when uncertainty, time, autonomy, and freedom of others are at stake. This project relies on three work-packages involve the theorization and experimentation of deontological preferences, the experimental observation of intertemporal social behaviors and behaviors in situations of uncertainty, as well as the testing of considering the autonomy and freedom of other individuals.