It has always been an important task of economics to assess individual and social welfare.
The traditional approach has assumed that the measuring rod for welfare is the satisfaction
of the individual's given and unchanging preferences, but recent work in behavioural
economics has called this into question by pointing out the inconsistencies and context-
dependencies of human behaviour. When preferences are no longer consistent, we have to
ask whether a different measure for individual welfare can, and should, be found. This book …

Economists have often been puzzled by Max Planck's famous remark to John Maynard
Keynes that ''in early life he had thought of studying economics, but had found it too
difficult!''(Keynes 1924, p. 333). If the study of economics is difficult, then it seems fair to say
that the study of welfare economics is particularly difficult. This is not because of the logical
structure of much of modern welfare economic thinking but because it is possible for
reasonable human beings to disagree about both the goals of welfare economics and the …