Ethical Consumerism
Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Economics Department, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 22-2024
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium to accommodate ethical preferences. I find (narrow) sufficient criteria under which such equilibria exist, and characterize consumer behavior in all such equilibria. Finally I find that ethical preferences can have arbitrary impacts on consumer behavior in equilibrium, including motivating a consumer (1) to decrease her consumption of all goods which she would prefer in greater supply and vice-versa, or (2) not to exhaust her budget, even if her utility increases both in her consumption and in the supply of all goods.
Other working papers
Estimating long-term treatment effects without long-term outcome data – David Rhys Bernard (Rethink Priorities), Jojo Lee and Victor Yaneng Wang (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The surrogate index method allows policymakers to estimate long-run treatment effects before long-run outcomes are observable. We meta-analyse this approach over nine long-run RCTs in development economics, comparing surrogate estimates to estimates from actual long-run RCT outcomes. We introduce the M-lasso algorithm for constructing the surrogate approach’s first-stage predictive model and compare its performance with other surrogate estimation methods. …
Existential risks from a Thomist Christian perspective – Stefan Riedener (University of Zurich)
Let’s say with Nick Bostrom that an ‘existential risk’ (or ‘x-risk’) is a risk that ‘threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development’ (2013, 15). There are a number of such risks: nuclear wars, developments in biotechnology or artificial intelligence, climate change, pandemics, supervolcanos, asteroids, and so on (see e.g. Bostrom and Ćirković 2008). …
Imperfect Recall and AI Delegation – Eric Olav Chen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Alexis Ghersengorin (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Sami Petersen (Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and aim to pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its options or deliver punishments. Instead, the principal is endowed with the ability to impose imperfect recall on the agent. The principal can then simulate the task and obscure whether it is real or part of a test. This allows the principal to screen misaligned AIs during testing and discipline their behaviour in deployment. By increasing the…