Respecting Preferences

Theorists of justice have to steer between two rocks. On the one hand, there is the intuition that an individual’s morally permitted preferences should be respected: it is not justifiable to intervene with them. On the other hand, such preferences are the result of formation processes, which are notoriously vulnerable to manipulation. Does justice demand respect for preferences that produce or perpetuate injustices, suffered either by the individual herself or by others? In this paper, I will investigate this problem in the context of the ambiguous tenet of neutrality. The field of gender justice has extended Rawlsian theories of justice in order to account for structural factors, such as socialisation. Some theorists have argued that the justice-inhibiting character of some preferences implies that the first intuition should be rejected in favour of the second in some cases, which leads to the conclusion that some preferences are like obstacles standing in the way of justice and should thus be reformed. I will call this the ‘Normative Hierarchy View’ and argue that it is problematic. It presupposes a certain attitude with respect to those who hold the preferences, which forecloses a politically salient kind of respect. Furthermore, at th

Culture, beliefs and economic performance

Beliefs are one component of culture. Data from the World Values Survey is available on a subset of beliefs concerning (broadly) meritocracy and poverty that appear relevant for economics. We document how they vary as well as their distribution across countries. We then correlate these measures of beliefs with economic growth and compare them with institutional and geographical determinants of income. A strong negative relationship is found between leftist economic beliefs and growth but little evidence is found of a relationship with respect to non-economic beliefs. Finally, we briefly discuss some causal effects on beliefs. The evidence suggests that higher country risk and more dependence on natural resources shifts nations to a more leftist set of economic beliefs. Overall the evidence supports the view that cultural specificities may explain why certain institutions cannot be transplanted between nations with different cultural histories and underlines the limit to policy activism

A Food Packaging Use Case for Argumentation

International audienceWithin the framework of the European project EcoBioCap (ECOefficient BIOdegradable Composite Advanced Packaging), aiming at conceiving the next generation of food packagings, we introduce an argumentation-based tool for management of conflicting viewpoints between preferences expressed by the involved parties (food and packaging industries, health and waste management authorities, consumers, etc.). In this paper we recall briefly the principles underlying the reasoning process, and we detail the main functionalities and the architecture of the argumentation tool covering the overall reasoning steps starting from formal representation of text arguments and ending by extraction of justified preferences. Finally, we detail its operational functioning through a real life case study to determine the justifiable choices between recyclable, compostable and biodegradable packaging materials based on stakeholders’ arguments

Allocation criteria under task performance: the gendered preference for protection

We device a randomized experiment with task performance in which players directly decide allocation criteria (with/without) veil of ignorance on payoff distribution under different criteria in a stakeholder/spectator position. Our main result is a strong and significant gender effect: women choose significantly more protection (that is, they choose criteria in which a part or all the total sum of money that must be allocated among participants is equally distributed) before (but not after) the removal of the veil of ignorance. They also reveal less overconfidence and significantly higher civicness and inequality aversion in ex post questionnaire responses, even though such differences are not enough to fully capture our main result. The puzzle when interpreting it is that the gendered preference for protection exists not only for stakeholders but also for spectators while it disappears for both once we remove the veil of ignorance. This makes it impossible to explain it exclusively with risk or competition aversion.Distributive Justice; Gender Effects; Risk Aversion; Competition Aversion; Veil of Ignorance

Complementarity of Reading from Paper and Screen in the Development of Critical Thinking Skills for 21st-century Literacy

The skill of reading undergoes dramatic changes due to the change of reading interface readers are exposed to. Readers who want to be active participants of knowledge society need to perceive it as more than just a receptive skill. The study aims to assess the condition of homo legens, diagnose what kind of reading interface preferences characterize 21st-century readers, how they respond to texts considering reading both digitally and in print, accepting or viewing critically the underlying ideology of the text. The analysis of the collected data attempts to determine if the reported preferences are conducive to the development of critical thinking skills for 21st century literacy, which include understanding complex ideas, evaluating evidence, weighing alternative perspectives and constructing justifiable arguments

Responsibility Effects in Decision Making under Risk

We systematically explore decision situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own in situations of payoff equality. In the gain domain we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion. This is however not attributable to a 'cautious shift' as often thought. Indeed, looking at risk attitudes in the loss domain, we find an increase in risk seeking under responsibility. This raises issues about the nature of various decision biases under risk, and to what extent changed behavior under responsibility may depend on a social norm of caution in situations of responsibility versus naive corrections from perceived biases. To further explore this issue, we designed a second experiment to explore risk-taking behavior for gain prospects offering very small or very large probabilities of winning. For large probabilities, we find increased risk aversion, thus confirming our earlier finding. For small probabilities however, we find an increase of risk seeking under conditions of responsibility. The latter finding thus discredits hypotheses of a social rule dictating caution under responsibility, and can be explained through flexible self-correction models predicting an accentuation of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes predicted by prospect theory. An additional accountability mechanism does not change risk behavior, except for mixed prospects, in which it reduces loss aversion. This indicates that loss aversion is of a fundamentally different nature than probability weighting or utility curvature. Implications for debiasing are discussed

Culture Differences and Tax Morale in the United States and Europe

In recent years much research has investigated whether values, social norms, and attitudes differ across countries and whether these differences have measurable effects on economic behavior. One area in which such studies are particularly relevant is tax compliance, given both the noted differences across countries in their levels of tax compliance and the marked inability of standard economic models of taxpayer compliance to explain these differences. In the face of these difficulties, many researchers have suggested that the intrinsic motivation for individuals to pay taxes - what is sometimes termed their "tax morale" - differs across countries. However, isolating the reasons for these differences in tax morale is notoriously difficult. In a common approach, studies sometimes referred to as "cultural studies" have often relied upon controlled laboratory experiments conducted in different countries because such experiments can be set up with identical experimental protocols to allow cultural effects to be isolated. In this paper we first analyze a cross-section of individuals in Spain and the United States using the World Values Survey (WVS). In line with previous experiments, our findings indicate a significantly higher tax morale in the United States than in Spain, controlling in a multivariate analysis for additional variables. We then extend our multivariate analysis to include 14 European countries in the estimations. Our results again indicate that the United States has the highest tax morale across all countries, followed by Austria and Switzerland. We also find a strong negative correlation between the size of shadow economy and the degree of tax morale in those countries