Manipulating Hedonic Strategies of Choice

2000

Coupe les arbres, si tu veux, casse aussi les pierres mais prends garde, prends garde à la lumière livide de l'utilité" (André Breton, Paul Eluard, L'Immaculée Conception) 0. Introduction: after Jevons, who needs Bentham ? It is generally agreed that the developments that Jeremy Bentham devoted to the positive aspects of the "principle of utility" exerted some influence over the rise of modern analysis of individual behaviour (see, for example, Stark 1946; Schumpeter 1954 or, more recently, Black 1988). Such an opinion would be confirmed by Jevons' acknowledgement of his being indebted to the Benthamite calculus of pleasure and pain (1871:27 1). Meanwhile, Jevons' decision to root his own contribution in Bentham's work rather than in more recent accounts of utilitarianism-such as John Stuart Mill's-is far from being some kind of ritual tribute, paid to the founder of the doctrine: Bentham was invoked in order both to testify the break with British political economy of the second half of the nineteenth century, and to give this break the legitimacy of an ancient tradition.

2006

This paper proposes an explanation for the universal human desire for increasing consumption. It holds that it was moulded in evolutionary times by a mechanism known to biologists as sexual selection, whereby a certain trait - observable consumption - is used by members of one sex to signal their unobservable characteristics valuable to members of the opposite sex. It then goes on to show that the standard economics problem of utility maximisation is formally equivalent to the standard biology problem of the maximisation of individual fitness, the ability to pass genes to future generations.

2007

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2003

In the period of the marginal revolution in England, utility was traditionally defined in reference to either desire or pleasure. William Stanley Jevons, for example, referred to pleasure. According to Jevons, utility was actually identical with the addition made to a person's happiness, that is to say to the sum of the pleasure created and the pain prevented (1871, pp. 5354). Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall's spiritual father and mother, criticized this Benthamist perspective (Sidgwick 1883, p. 63) and introduced another definition at Cambridge. By utility of material things, Sidgwick stated, we mean their capacity tosatisfy men's needs and desires (1883, p. 84, emphasis added). Marshall, for his part, repeatedly moved from one meaning to another. In the first edition of his Principles of Economics, the term utility alternatively designated desire or pleasure. Few commentators have noted this double meaning of utility (Homan 1933, p. 224; Stigler 1950, p. 384; Guillebau...

Handbook of Consumer Psychology, 2014

There are at least two general approaches to improve consumer's happiness. One is to enhance the magnitude of desired external stimuli (e.g., amount of income, size of home, number of shoes). The other is to find the optimal relationship between external stimuli and happiness. The following analogy illustrates the distinction between these approaches. Suppose that a child loves wooden blocks and possesses some. He has played with the ones he owns for a while and is bored. How can he increase his happiness? One approach is to obtain more blocks. The other approach is to find a better way to combine the existing pieces and build more enjoyable projects.

1

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2007

In this article, I discuss some earlier debates about the foundations of utility and its measurement, focusing on the contributions of Francis Y. Edgeworth (1845–1926), a famous British economist who was a leader in the development of a more mathematically structured economics in the late 1800s, and Irving Fisher (1867–1947), one of the first quantitative U.S. economists, best-known today for

The Journal of Philosophy, 1992

E~ a VERYBODY agrees that we have intrinsic desires. Obviously, we have desires; many of them are derivative; so, in a kind of analogy to a deductive theory that divides its provable statements into axioms and theorems, some of them must be basic. There is much less agreement about what our intrinsic desires are or should be. Still, no one doubts that we intrinsically desire, among other things, happiness, pleasure, and the absence of pain, certain qualities of our sensations, feelings, moods, and psychological states in general. We desire these things, but without having, or feeling the need to have, a justification for doing so. Desires come in various strengths, and, together with more or less firm beliefs, they guide rational action. The formal counterparts of these concepts in decision theory are utility and probability. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic desires is also reflected in decision theory, where each model contains a utility function that is basic (at least relative to that model) and an expected utility function that is derived from the basic utility function and the subjective probability function of the model.' On the whole, decision theory certainly provides the best formal explication of our intuitive reasoning about desires and beliefs in practical deliberation. A person's intrinsically desired psychological states should thus be in the domain of her utility function. But then, we claim, decision theory fails. More specifically, we shall defend two theses: (a) If a decision situation exhibits a certain causal structure, then * We gratefully acknowledge the opportunities to discuss this paper at the Freie Universitat/Berlin, the University of Tilburg, and the University of California/Irvine. In particular, we are very much indebted to

Although pleasure played a central role in early theories of decision making, it gradually became peripheral, largely because of measurement concerns. Normative theories became more mathematical, and descriptive theories emphasized cognition over emotion. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in emotions and choice. This article examines attempts to model pleasure and pain in terms of utilities, decision weights, and counterfactual comparisons. Research on disappointment and regret has provided both empirical and theoretical insights. Many researchers now realize that the predictability of the emotions that follow from decisions is as important as the predictability of choice.

Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997

Two core meanings of "utility" are distinguished. "Decision utility" is the weight of an outcome in a decision. "Experienced utility" is hedonic quality, as in Bentham's usage. Experienced utility can be reported in real time (instant utility), or in retrospective evaluations of past episodes (remembered utility). Psychological research has documented systematic errors in retrospective evaluations, which can induce a preference for dominated options. We propose a formal normative theory of the total experienced utility of temporally extended outcomes. Measuring the experienced utility of outcomes permits tests of utility maximization and opens other lines of empirical research.