Social Welfare and Behavioral Public Policies
236 Pages Posted: 17 Apr 2018
Date Written: December 1, 2014
Abstract
This book proposes a detailed introduction to behavioral public policymaking and three original contributions. The introductory chapter focuses on specific issues of welfare analysis. Welfare analysis is a two steps procedure. First, the analyst determines how a policy affects individuals’ well-being. Second, the analyst aggregates the well-being across individuals. In the remaining sections of the introduction, I focus on the first step of the procedure. I propose an overview of the literature and of the still open debate regarding this issue between behavioral science scholars. I focus on the second step of the welfare analysis procedure in chapter 2. Beside introducing and discussing the problem of aggregation of individuals’ utility and proposing an overview of the literature, in this chapter I also suggest a methodological contribution concerning the social analyst’s choice of the social welfare function. In chapter 3 and 4 I discuss two innovative policies that make use of behavioral regularities in order to increase social welfare.
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