SéMINAIRE DE RECHERCHE EN éCONOMIE - GATE Lyon Saint-Etienne : Kevin Leportier

Kevin Leportier, University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, présentera un séminaire intitulé : On the meaning of freedom of choice in interactive contexts.

Résumé / abstract  : In the last few decades, a literature exploring multiple dimensions of freedom of choice emerged in normative economics. It considers an individual choosing an option in a set (called an opportunity set) and attempts to capture the meaning of freedom of choice by defining and characterizing formal rankings of such sets. Despite the diversity of the rankings proposed, most contributions to this literature still ignore the larger (social, economic) context in which the choices are made. Because they take opportunity sets as fixed, they implicitly assume that an individual’s choice in these sets cannot be affected by the decisions of others. Once this assumption is dropped, difficult but engaging questions arise : what does it mean to choose among options whose availability depends on the decisions of others ? How does power relates to freedom of choice ? Is it possible — or even, conceivable — to improve simultaneously the freedom of choice of multiple individuals if their actions and interests are intertwined ? Borrowing from Christian’s List work (2006) on the modal interpretation of republican freedom, I address these issues in a game form framework by connecting rankings of game forms to various normative dimensions of freedom.