Choice and welfare under social constraints
研究了当人们面临未观察到的社会约束时，如何谨慎地从选择中推断偏好，并指出标准福利分析方法可能产生误导。
Economists often rely on people’ s choices to infer their preferences. However, inferring preferences from choices becomes problematic when people face unobserved constraints. In this paper, I study how to (cautiously) infer preferences from choices when the choices of the members of a social group are subject to a constraint that we only imperfectly know. When this happens, heterogeneity in the group’ s choices, along with more information about the constraint, helps recover the preferences of group members, whereas homogeneity in choices hinders it. I further argue that standard approaches to choice-based welfare analysis can lead to misleading inferences about welfare when there are unobserved social constraints.