Actions can provide “responsibility utility” when they signal the actors’ identities or values to others or to themselves. This paper considers a novel implication of this responsibility utility for welfare analysis: fully informed incentive-compatible choice data can give a biased measure of the utility delivered by exogenously determined outcomes. A person’s choice of a policy outcome may be informed by responsibility utility that would be strictly absent if that same person were a passive recipient of that same policy outcome. We introduce the term “desirance” to describe a rank ordering over exogenously determined outcomes and present evidence that desirance captures the welfare consequences of exogenously determined outcomes more accurately than preference. We review literatures showing that preference is sensitive to contextual variations that influence responsibility utility and show experimentally that responsibility utility can explain discrepancies between welfare estimates derived from choice data and subjective well-being data. We close by discussing subjective well-being as a potential measure of desirance.

当行动向他人或自己表明行动者的身份或价值观时，行动可以提供“责任效用”。本文考虑了这种责任效用对福利分析的新含义：完全知情的激励相容选择数据可以对由外生决定的结果提供的效用进行有偏见的衡量。一个人对政策结果的选择可能会受到责任效用的影响，如果同一个人是同一政策结果的被动接受者，则该效用将严格不存在。我们引入术语“愿望”来描述对外生决定结果的排序，并提供证据表明愿望比偏好更准确地捕捉外生决定结果的福利后果。我们回顾了表明偏好对影响责任效用的上下文变化敏感的文献，并通过实验表明责任效用可以解释来自选择数据和主观幸福感数据的福利估计之间的差异。我们通过讨论主观幸福感作为欲望的潜在衡量标准来结束。