ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: From Homo Economicus to Homo Psychologicus: the Paretian Foundations of Behavioural Welfare Economics
Author: Lecouteux Guilhem
Behavioural welfare economics aims at designing public policies helping boundedly rational individuals to satisfy their own preferences. It is assumed that (i) individuals are defined by true preferences on which they would act were they able to reason correctly, (ii) the satisfaction of those preferences constitutes the normative criterion, and (iii) it is possible to elicit those preferences from the social planner standpoint. We argue that this ontological model was implicit in neoclassical economics from Pareto on, and that behavioural welfare economics shares Pareto reductionist account of human beings -- as separable between a Homo economicus and a Homo psychologicus. We highlight the conceptual difficulties of those three claims, and argue that those difficulties are due to the project of behavioural economists of integrating psychology into economic models, rather than grounding economic models on psychology.
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