Economics Research Seminar – Professor Andrea Isoni
Economics Research Seminar – Professor Andrea Isoni
Title: The Demand and Supply of Paternalism
Date: 7 May 2025
Time: 13:30- 14:30
Venue: Online https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/84714610737
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
The Demand and Supply of Paternalism
Speaker: Professor Andrea Isoni
Andrea joined the Behavioural Science Group at Warwick Business School in 2012. He obtained his PhD in Economics at the University of East Anglia in 2009. He has previously worked as Lecturer in Environmental and Resource Economics at School of Environmental Sciences of the University of East Anglia, and as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science and at the Department of Economics of the University of Warwick.
Andrea is an experimental and behavioural economist. His research studies human behaviour of under controlled laboratory conditions using insights from economic theory and cognitive psychology. His main interests are in the areas of individual decision-making, in particular reference-dependent preferences and decisions under risk and uncertainty. Andrea is also interested in exploring how market interaction shapes people’s preferences, and in various aspects of strategic behaviour, including coordination, bargaining and other-regarding behaviour.
Abstract:
The evidence that individuals may recognise that their hot desires are often inconsistent with their cool judgments has led to calls for paternalistic interventions to support better decisions. In two pre-registered incentivised experiments based on a paradigm involving trade-offs between smaller-sooner and larger-later future rewards, we investigate whether individuals express a desire for self-constraint that represses hot desires in favour of cool judgments (demand for inner paternalism), whether they would like such constraints to be imposed externally (demand for outer paternalism), and whether they would be willing to constrain others (supply of paternalism).
Experiment 1 uses a between-subject design that documents a high inner demand of paternalism and a high supply, but a much lower outer demand. Constraints favouring impatient options are as common as constraints favouring patient options, and mostly compatible with participants’ cool judgments. In line with typical findings, preference reversals favouring impatient choices prevail over the opposite reversals.
Experiment 2 replicates these broad findings in a within-subject design, which also documents a strong correlation between supply and demand for inner paternalism, but a much weaker correlation between supply and outer demand. Considering external restrictions first slightly decreases self-imposed constraints and constraints on others, while constraining others first increases acceptance of external constraints.
The large gap between outer demand and supply is inconsistent with known notions of paternalism and challenges justifications of paternalism based on people’s desire to limit their own or others’ future choices. It does, however, seem consistent with basic principles of decision making.