The Freedom to Choose

The FREE project consists of three work packages focusing on different aspects of freedom, responsibility, and economic behavior. Work Package 1 (WP1): Perceptions of Free Choice WP1 examines what people generally consider to be free choices and when they hold others personally responsible for their decisions. The package has initiated three sub-projects: WP1.1 Positive and Negative Freedom: This project studies two different types of freedom – positive and negative – and examines the extent to which a representative sample in the United States values these different forms. The first data collection has been completed, and analyses are ongoing. WP1.2 Social Belonging and Autonomy: This project investigates the relationship between social belonging and individual autonomy to determine if these factors act as opposites or complement each other. A first data collection has also been completed here. WP1.3 Dishonest Behavior and Group Identity: This project examines how group identity affects the occurrence of dishonest behavior by varying the identity of those financially impacted by potential dishonesty. The first data collection has been completed. Work Package 2 (WP2): Freedom versus Justice WP2 focuses on how considerations of freedom and personal responsibility affect attitudes toward inequality and redistribution policies. The package has initiated three sub-projects: WP2.1 Cancel the Deal?: This project, already accepted in Management Science, explores people’s willingness to cancel voluntary agreements to achieve a fairer distribution. WP2.2 Free to Help: This project collects experimental data on how people weigh others' freedom to help whomever they wish against the desire to eliminate inequality based on luck. Data collection has been completed, and the article is currently being written. WP2.3 Challenging the Pareto Principle: This study examines how people evaluate risk and uneven outcomes (ex-post inequality) when facing risks in social situations. Data collection has been completed, and analysis is underway. Work Package 3 (WP3): Paternalism and Economic Choices WP3 studies the trade-off between individual freedom and societal welfare, with a focus on paternalistic measures. The work package includes several sub-projects: WP3.1 Freedom versus Welfare: This project examines how freedom of choice can lead to "free-rider" behavior in group settings, where individuals maximize their own gains at the group’s expense. A pilot study has recently been completed. WP3.2 Pre-commitment and Performance: This project studies the effect of "pre-commitment" strategies on performance-based efforts and how individual differences in self-control influence the acceptance of a paternalistic strategy to promote personal effort. The article has been submitted for peer review. WP3.3 Paternalism Across the World: Data on paternalistic preferences from 58 countries has been collected, and a draft article has been written. WP3.4 Targeted Paternalism: This project examines people’s willingness to limit others’ freedom to choose when it does not restrict the freedom of others. Data collection is completed. Further Work All work packages have made significant progress in data collection and analysis, and several of the projects are ready for publication or under peer review. In the coming period, we will continue working on publishing and further developing the findings from the individual projects. One PhD student is currently affiliated with the project, with two additional students set to join next fall.

FREE consists of three work packages. The first work-package, WP1: Perceptions of free choice, provides ground-breaking studies of what people in the general population view as a free choice and when they holdothers personally responsible for their choices. This work-package includes a combination of survey experiments and incentivized behavioral experiments, designed to establish under what conditions people are viewed as having the freedom to choose and the implications of these perceptions for the attributions of personal responsibility. The second work-package, WP2: Freedom versus fairness, involves ambitious studies of how considerations of freedom and personal responsibility affect the willingness to accept inequality and attitudes to redistributive policies. In Western societies, there is an inherent tension between the liberal ideal that individuals should have the freedom to pursue their own idea of the good life and the egalitarian ideal that inequalities due to luck are unfair and should be eliminated. This work package will provide a comprehensive analysis of how the ideal that people should be free to pursue their own idea of the good life - and help those they care about - shapes individual distributive behaviour and its implications for redistributive policies. The third work-package, WP3: Paternalism and economic choices, introduces a truly novel approach to research on paternalism. FREE will use survey’s experiments and incentivized behavioral experiments to study how concerns for the freedom to choose is traded off against concerns for individual welfare and how this trade-off affects the support for paternalistic interventions in society. FREE will conduct a global study across 80 countries to shed new light on the striking differences in attitudes to inequality and paternalistic policies across the world.