Individual paternalistic preferences are central to the question to what extent the state may intervene in the freedom of choice of its citizens. Albeit its practical and theoretical importance, there is yet no incentivised tool to elicit those preferences. In this paper, we present a simple and...

How do we understand human nature? The purpose of this Essay is to examine the relationship between human nature and social institutions. More concretely, the question is: What does an accurate account of human nature tell us about the choice of a desirable set of social institutions? Accounts...

The status-enhancement theory of overconfidence proposes that overconfidence pervades self-judgment because it helps people attain higher social status. Prior work has found that highly confident individuals attained higher status regardless of whether their confidence was justified by actual...

A nudge is a non-coercive paternalistic intervention that attempts to improve choices by manipulating the framing of a decision problem. As any paternalism, it faces the difficulty of determining the appropriate welfare criterion. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in...

The measurement of preferences often relies on surveys in which individuals evaluate hypothetical scenarios. This paper proposes and validates a novel factorial survey tool to measure fairness preferences. We examine whether a non-incentivized survey captures the same distributional preferences...