Opportunity and Preference Learning

Robert Sugden has recently elaborated upon the case for a normative standard of freedom as “opportunity” that is supposed to cope with the problem of how to realign normative economics – with its traditional rational choice orientation – with behavioral economics. His standard, though, presupposes that people respond to uncertainty about their own future preferences by dismissing any kind of self-commitment. We argue that the approach lacks psychological substance: Sugden’s normative benchmark – the “responsible person” – is a purely artificial construct that can hardly serve as a convincing role model in a contractarian setting. An alternative concept is introduced, and some policy implications are briefly discussed.