中文摘要
经济学家常常依赖人们的选择来推断其偏好。然而, 当人们面临未被观察到的约束时, 从选择推断偏好就会成为问题。在本文中, 我研究当一个社会群体成员的选择受到一种我们仅能不完全了解的约束时, 如何 (谨慎地) 从选择推断偏好。当这种情况发生时, 群体选择的异质性, 连同关于约束的更多信息, 有助于还原群体成员的偏好, 而选择的同质性则会阻碍这一恢复。我进一步论证, 当存在未被观察到的社会约束时, 基于选择的福利分析的标准方法可能导致关于福利的误导性推断。
Abstract
Economists often rely on people’ s choices to infer their preferences. However, inferring preferences from choices becomes problematic when people face unobserved constraints. In this paper, I study how to (cautiously) infer preferences from choices when the choices of the members of a social group are subject to a constraint that we only imperfectly know. When this happens, heterogeneity in the group’ s choices, along with more information about the constraint, helps recover the preferences of group members, whereas homogeneity in choices hinders it. I further argue that standard approaches to choice-based welfare analysis can lead to misleading inferences about welfare when there are unobserved social constraints.