Behavioral Public Choice: A Survey

Abstract

Public choice theory has originally been motivated by the need to correct the asymmetry, widespread in traditional welfare economics, between the motivational assumptions of market participants and policymakers: Those who played the game of politics should also be considered rational and self-interested. History repeats itself with the rise of behavioral economics: Cognitive biases discovered in market participants often induce a call for rational governments to intervene. Recently, however, behavioral economics has also been applied to the explanatory analysis of the political process. This paper surveys the current state of the emerging field of "behavioral public choice" and considers the scope for further research.

Psychologically-Based Voting with Uncertainty

“…Recalling from page 14 that expressions in (9) through (12) are valid also for the undesirable mixing equilibrium, but possibly with a di¤erent sign, and taking into consideration the results from Lemmas 3 and 4: 1. The results follow for state s A from ( 9) and (29), and for state s B from (11) and (32). 2.…”

The power of public choice in law and economics

“…Schnellenbach and Schubert (2014) 14 differentiate between “weak” and strong variants of Behavioral Public Choice, stressing that the former stream merely alters auxiliary assumptions on the content of the utility function of the standard model (for example, voters also care about their civic duty when going to polls), while the “strong” variant aims at explaining and not just postulating such motivational extensions. The authors provide an excellent literature overview of aspects such as voting paradox, the roots and consequences of expressive voting, retrospective voting, or the determinants of political preferences.…”

Regulation as delegation

“…Очевидно, что если агент имеет собственные предпочтения, отличающиеся от мотиваций принципала, то делегирование гораздо менее желательно. Новое направление «бихевиористского общественного выбора» [24,50] справедливо обращает внимание на эти особенности, и их можно рассматривать как часть БТПА. [52][53][54].…”