期刊名称：SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association
印刷版ISSN：1869-4187
电子版ISSN：1869-4195
出版年度：2012
卷号：3
期号：1-2
页码：209-226
DOI：10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
出版社：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
摘要：This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life. We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime’s freedom of choice: the lifetime’s freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state.
