Abstract
In his book The Community of Advantage, Sugden proposes a form of normative economics that is almost free of the concept of preferences. Specifically, Sugden relies on the idea that everyone can accept the principle that more opportunities is better than less. Yet, this approach cannot be easily applied to the choice of economic reforms that fail to provide more opportunities for everyone. This paper complements an approach proposed by Sugden to deal with non-nested opportunity sets. We rely on the idea that people should take responsibility for the choices that were not endorsed before the reform takes place. In this perspective, a reform project is admissible if it allows people to stick to their initial choices and provides them with a rich set of opportunities (that is, the new opportunity regime must also satisfy Sugden’s Strong Interactive Opportunity Criterion). As an illustration, we show how routine redistribution schemes can make free trade be preferred to autarky even if it does not provide more opportunities for everyone.
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Notes
I am grateful to Robert Sugden for his constructive remarks on two previous versions of this work. I also thank the Editor, Clemens Puppe, for his help on the last version of the paper. Any error is my sole responsibility.
Sugden (2021, p. 426), however, underlines that there are two versions of the opportunity principle in TCA. At the individual level, this opportunity means that more opportunity is always welcome. At the collective level, what matters is collective opportunity and in particular that the Strong Interactive Opportunity Criterion be satisfied. So, Sugden does not argue that more is always better at the collective level.
In this regard, all policy issues addressed in the chapter Regulation of TCA are solved by adopting regulations that expand opportunities for mutually beneficial transactions.
Here, allowable refers to both physical as well as institutional feasibility.
Elements of subsets of \({\mathbb {R}}^{m+n}\) are in bold letters.
An acquisition profile is feasible for a set \(S \subset I\) of individuals if \(\sum _{i \in S} q_{i}= 0\).
See appendix 2 of Sugden (2017, p. 501).
This assumption means that money is desired either when good g price is relatively high (think about consumers who sell that good), or when this price is low enough (think about consumers who buy that good).
I thank Robert Sugden for this remark.
If \(q_i\) were not in \({{\mathcal {O}}}_i\), it was out of reach and consumer i does not need to take responsibility for it not having been chosen.
This notion of responsibility appears to be the same as that adopted in The Community of Advantage, notably in subsections 5.5 and 5.6 of that book.
This subsection heavily relies on Robert Sugden’s remarks on a previous version of this work.
The proof of this theorem does not depend on whether there is one our several countries.
We shall ignore international transfers.
That follows from the fact that for all c, the autarkic individual profiles \(q^{c}_{i}\) are feasible at the national level: \(\sum _{i} q^{c}_{i} = 0\). Then, \(\sum _{i} T^c_{i} = \sum _{i} \langle {p} - {p}^c, q^c_i \rangle = \langle {p} - {p}^c, \sum _{i} q^{c}_{i} \rangle = 0\).
References
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Crettez, B. On Sugden’s normative economics and the comparison of non-nested opportunity sets. Soc Choice Welf 60, 545–559 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-022-01433-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-022-01433-3