Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On Ranking Opportunity Sets in Terms of Freedom of Choice

1990; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Linguagem: Inglês

Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Yongsheng Xu,

Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.