Measuring Welfare Beyond Choice: Evidence for Policy Design

Objective

This MSCA fellowship develops new methods to assess whether policies truly enhance well-being, in line with the European Union’s goal of promoting “the well-being of its peoples” (Lisbon Treaty, Article 3). Standard welfare economics assumes that choices reveal what is best for individuals, yet this approach fails in three important situations: when welfare depends on beliefs that people cannot directly choose between, when the mere presence of options affects feelings such as regret or elation, and when preferences evolve over time. These gaps matter for EU policy debates on transparency, consumer protection, and long-term interventions. The project addresses each limitation with a dedicated research package. First, it measures the welfare cost of false beliefs through incentivized experiments, where participants can reveal hidden fees to consumers, and incorporates the findings into a public-finance model to quantify the transparency-efficiency trade-off. Second, it develops tools to evaluate welfare when menus matter in risky decisions, such as insurance, combining choices with structured self-assessments of emotions to capture how unchosen options can generate regret and reduce welfare---offering evidence for debates on dark patterns and choice architecture. Third, it proposes a coherent framework for welfare under changing preferences, assuming stability at the deeper level of preferences over mental states, such as happiness, pride, and regret, while allowing the mapping from goods to feelings to evolve. Hosted at Tilburg University’s leading behavioral economics group and CentERlab, the fellowship combines theory, laboratory experiments, and structural estimation, with targeted training in microeconometrics, research integrity, open science, and teaching. The outcome is a practical, evidence-based toolkit enabling policymakers to evaluate regulations and interventions by their impact on people’s actual welfare---not merely their observed choices.